About the Strategy Videos

These videos are part of a series on strategy management. The series has material on models, analytics and adaptive insight needed in today’s rapidly changing external environment and an adaptive strategy approach that responds to those changes. The videos are on YouTube and are part of a Strategy Management Playlist. Future strategy videos will be posted to the YouTube playlist as they become available.

Strategy Management:

Strategy management is the blanket term that includes all the facets of strategy in an organization. Success doing strategy involves integrating many concepts, techniques, and analytics such that a sharply focused direction is defined. Further, that direction must be adjustable and adaptable to the rate of change determined by industry or other external changes. With over 75 business models to choose from the suite you pick for your strategy effort is critical to achieving strategic success. Integrating the most appropriate combination of business models with a clear strategic workflow is the starting point. Strategic success is defined by measured organization performance, risk absorption, probability of achieving desired results, and the degree to which results are achieved. .

The motive for an integrated approach to strategy is reduced uncertainty and increased confidence in setting direction. Simplify using established business models for strategy formulation. Analytic workflows with advanced analytics are used especially for gap analysis. Semantic relationship analysis assures connection and alignment. The key to simple and adaptable strategy management is using well defined and established business models integrated into a methodology. Some strategic efforts are focused on a more tactical view, that is, fixing problems today and projecting their resolution into future performance. Other strategic efforts deal with changes in markets, products, competitors, innovation, market entry and other situations that are not part of the current portfolio of organizational interest. Either way a simple, easy to implement and adaptable strategy management approach is needed.
See the video on Strategy Management

Strategy Formulation:

Strategy formulation is the core of strategy management. Formulation includes identifying and organizing the direction you want to pursue. The time frame could be anywhere from 5 to 20 years. It can be a near strategy of 5 years or long-term strategy of 20 plus years. Direction spanning 3 to 5 years may be classed as tactical planning and is focused on fixing issues in the current functioning of the organization. It is also possible in high dynamic industries such as computer technology that the strategic view would be much shorter.

So the strategy formulation cycle depends on the timing of change in your industry or suite of industries. This is especially true for very large organizations. There are 3 perspectives in strategy today, operational, tactical and strategic.
See the video on Strategy Formulation

Strategic Alignment:

So you have done a SWOT analysis for strategic direction and alignment with emphasis on the best choices for guiding an organization. You may even have focused on a capabilities approach to make sure that the organization can achieve a desired direction. However, more than a swot analysis may be needed. Added insight decreases uncertainty, and increases assurance that changes in the external environment track successfully to operational execution. Proper alignment assures resources support the capabilities and desired initiatives. This means some added insight and analytics are necessary. The approach described in the attached video introduces a unifying method for alignment.
See the video on Strategic Alignment!

Gap Analysis:

Better strategy gap analysis is needed. Gap analysis today is done by comparing actual outcomes with expected outcomes. The comparison is based on monetary and quantitative outcome goals. This is an ‘after the fact’ information approach that is useful for detecting that there is an issue. You need to know why the difference happened. Typically a management would take an ‘external action’ that is, reducing costs, increasing prices, etc.

Whether a measurable goal is achievable depends on the resources used to support that goal. Also the relevancy may have changed and that is sensed by changes in the properties of strategies such as importance. A strategic goal that has several resources needed for support may not be specific enough to achieve success. This situation is not easily exposed through current outcome analysis. These issues related to the strategic element are focused and filtered using a techniques such as property analysis, path to point analysis and composite algorithm workflows. This video provides a brief introduction to the gap analysis ideas.
See the video on Gap Analysis

Innovation and Strategy:

There are numerous approaches to innovation and strategy, such as integrating innovation with strategy and managing innovation as a separate effort then linking to strategy. How strategy relates to innovation and how innovation potentiates an organization is fuzzy at best. Integration can be tight, or loose depending on the structure and management models used. Usually a mix of innovation approaches is used. Few approaches utilize emerging analytics. These analytics are associated with the insight in choosing and managing innovation opportunities. Analytics should help reduce uncertainty and help anticipate issues when evaluating choice, decisions, progress and achievement.

One solution is to use portfolio management concepts coupled with strategic alignment to assess how you are doing with your innovation efforts in context with the organization. To ‘remain in the game’ means not just survival but growth and profits. You need innovation integrated with strategy and aligned with operations. This approach accommodates small to large innovation efforts, from improvement innovations to disruptive change innovations.
For an overview of how to do this watch the following short video Innovation and Strategy