Strategic Leadership and Choices: Analyzing and Evaluating Case Study Organization's Direction

Omalaja and Eruola (2011 p60) summarise corporate strategy as

““The pattern of decisions in a company that determines and reviews its objectives, purposes, goals, produce the principal policies and plans for achieving these goals and defines the range of business which the company is to pursue, the kind of economic and human organization it is or intends to be and the nature of economic and non?economic contributions it intends to make to its beneficiaries.”

Strategic management is the process and approach of specifying an organization’s objectives, developing policies, programmes, paradigms and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources required to realise the objectives. In consideration of the modern approach to rational corporate strategy formulation, strategic management can be seen as management of strategy development, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation (Johnson et al. 2014). Whereas rational strategy may be planned, through analysis of strategic position, evaluation of strategic choices, there are nevertheless, other approaches to strategy development. Henry Mintzberg (1987) argues that most corporate strategy is not rational but ‘emergent’ in that it evolves or emerges over time.

Charles Lindblom (1990) argues for strategic incrementalism; asserting that strategy develops as small extensions of past policy instead radical shifts following extensive analysis. Yet still there is argument that freewheeling opportunists do not like strategic planning; preferring to see and grab opportunities as opportunities arise in the market place. Johnson et al. (2014) have summarised the above approaches to strategy formulation in their model of strategy lenses, whence strategy may be viewed through the lenses of ‘strategy as design’, ‘strategy as experience’, ‘strategy as ideas’ and ‘strategy as discourse’.

In effect, corporate strategy deals with product?market positioning; that is, how the organisation will select marketing and product/service areas in which it will compete, the direction in which it will seek to grow and develop, the value and growth objectives it seeks to achieve, the interaction within the organisation and its external parameters, its internal adjustment policies and programs to changes in marketing places or other elements in its external environment; the competitive tools the organisation will employ, as well as the way in which the organisations will configure its resources.

Students should be mindful that the coursework to assess module learning is aimed at enabling the student to individually complete the following tasks;

By week three, (3), you will, in consultation with the module tutor, select or be allocated, from the list in Table 1, one case study organisation, preferably, operating in the sector, industry or market broadly relevant to your course of study.

Overview of Assessment

Pharma

GlaxoSmithKline PLC - UK

Sanofi - France

Bayer AG - Germany

Consumer & Other Healthcare

McKesson Corporation – USA (focus on AAH - UK)

Walgreens Boots Alliance – USA & UK

Private or Public Sector Hospitals

Hospital Corporation America (HCA) Healthcare Inc. - USA

National Health Service Trust - UK

Project Management Consultancy

Bechtel – USA

Private and Public Sector Infrastructure

Vinci – France

Skanska. – Sweden

Network Rail – UK

London Underground - UK

House Builders in the UK

Kier Group

Persimmon Group

Bovis Homes

Critically analyse and evaluate strategic leadership in your case study organisation. (50 marks)

In completing this task, you may wish to research your organisation using a range of sources. Searching for source material may be initiated from Google, Google Scholar or EBSCOhost (accessed through ARU Library).

• Case-study organisation or company website

• Mass media organisation website, e.g. BBC, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Times, etc.

• Accessible market research data, e.g.;

Craft: https://craft.co/

CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/

D&B Hoovers: http://www.hoovers.com/company-information.html

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/datamonitor

Euromonitor Passport: https://go.euromonitor.com/passport.html

Mintel Industry Analysis: https://www.mintel.com/

OECD: https://www.oecd.org/

The World Bank: https://www.worldbank.org/

• Other sources of market research data, e.g.: IBIS World, GMID, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Statista, Bloomberg, KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), Deloitte, Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CBInsights, etc.

Approaches to analysing and evaluating strategic leadership of an organisation may be qualitative, quantitative or both. Approaches, (or methodologies), developed by Standard & Poor's (2019).

Propose and critically evaluate two or three contextually appropriate strategic choices and recommend strategic action. (40 marks)

While your answer to Task 1 largely focusses on the organisation’s history and its current position, your answer to Task 2 should focus on your organisation’s future.

You may use any methodology to rank and recommend appropriate strategic direction from the identified choices. One approach is the SAFe framework (Johnson et al. 2014).

With regard to strategic action, it is important to appreciate that this is largely about organising and combing resources (e.g. human, material, financial, intellectual, etc.) using competencies (e.g. intellect, skills, knowledge, technology, experience, etc.) (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).

Therefore, you need to outline the resources and competencies required to action the entrepreneurial opportunity; You then need to outline whether the resources are available within the organisation or are within the reach of the organisation. Finally, you need to discuss the organisation’s capability and competency to organise the resources.

Present own work to a high academic standard (10 Marks)