Strategic Influence
This section describes the assessment by 2 teams of business leadership professionals and measures the potential future strategic influence of the organizations reviewed through the SWOT analysis of two separate Canadian business organizations. Teams evaluated anticipated strategic influence for each organization and made suggestions regarding how to further develop the strategic influence for each organization’s future. Using chapter 4 of Richard Hughes, Katherine Colarelli Beatty & David Dinwoodie (2014) Becoming a Strategic Leader (pp. 145-195), teams prepared an assessment of each organization’s present strategic influence and outlined developmental steps for seeing the organization’s possible future strategic influence by staying the course toward future development and change. Teams prepare reports and suggestions based on findings in their review of organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Using Chapters 6-9 of Galbraith’s Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure and Process at the Business Unit Levels (pp. 131-216) teams also identify/determine the organizational designs best suited for developing each organization’s desired strategic influence. Designs listed by Galbraith, describing specific design fit or lack is an important part of understanding the effectiveness future strategic planning has on the organizations reviewed. Realization of anticipated strategic influence describe organizational vision for the future, in terms of suggested or negated organizational operating designs, creates an effective framework for protecting future paths for the organizations and makes their success more likely than without identifying the structure they follow clearly.
Teams created a workable hybrid and added suggestions for organizational practice, using available documentation about the organization gathered from their SWOT investigation. In the cases outlined by the teams in this section, one team proposed two organizational designs as most effective for the development of strategic influence practices. A matrix design, representing the main profit centers by geographic location and key departments within the organization, with the other being a divisional model with profit centers becoming its own organizational entity with all functions reporting within that division.
Taking these steps toward strategic discovery helped each leader and each team of business leadership professionals, through each exercise, discover what it means to become a more effective strategic leader and develop practices common to the competent and confident practice of strategic leadership.
