Heading into the once-a-year break, the onwards to- when?

Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Week 5 Weekly Summary

This week felt more like a week six than a week five.  Preparing the strategic plan draft so it was good enough to share with team members became more work that I had expected.  I used my own company for the strategic plan which gave me good access to information on the company, but also had the negative side effect of giving me access to too much information.  Filtering became a job all by itself, followed by adapting to a continually changing business.  For my “What did you learn this week #1″ I chose to comment on why strategic plans must be living document (and in my case, the tactical planning derived from the plan even more so).

The main topics in the text this week were strategic controls and quality improvement.  The treatment of strategic controls in this text was much weaker than a discussion we had in a previous class, so it is nice to see some of the information from that previous class get used to help this one along.  I was pleased to see the discussion of six-sigma and balanced scorecards, both concepts I’ve had clients use (and also topics from previous classes).  ISO 9004 was also touched on but I haven’t worked with it in my company or at client offices.  For my “What did you learn this week and how are you going to use it #2″ I chose balanced scorecards for the possible applicability to how my company shares financial and operations reports with employees.

For “What did you learn this week #3″ I chose selecting financial forecast metrics and key ratios.  It isn’t a specific topic we discussed in depth but it was the side effect of some of the discussions during the week.  Common ratios my company uses are sales by month, bill rate by month, trailing 12-month revenue, top 10 customers, and sales by department.  As a consulting firm we also look at utilization rates and headcount.  Working on financial projections I also wanted to get deeper into contribution margins and variability, and this last one is where I hit a wall.  Calculating variability seemed like an obvious choice when one of the long-term objectives in my strategic plan was generating multiple streams of revenue with a sub-heading of “generating annualized and highly predictable revenue”.  The bottom line is that it is easy to calculate historical variability, but projecting future variability has been a crap shoot.  As a business intelligence consulting company, this may become a side project for one of our data mining and artificial intelligence engineers, but it is not ready for prime time in terms of business planning at our company.

Now we’re on break for two weeks.  I’m not sure what to do with myself.  The end is in sight and then the next destination for Where’s Adam’s IPod will have to be chosen carefully.  Maybe a trip into the past…

Well Thought Out Tactics, oh how I love thee

Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Week 4 Weekly Summary

I don’t think I’ve mentioned how this instructor presents discussion questions.  She offers six questions, and allows students to pick any two.  This would be really great in a large class, spreading the conversation over more topics.  In this class, the headcount is down, and dwindling.  I think a lot of people took the holiday period off, and a few have dropped as the course has gone along.  The combination of a low headcount and a large spread of discussion questions results in some questions not getting much attention.  To lighten things up I took on one of the questions that had been ignored.  The comment back from the instructor was (paraphrasing here) thanks for playing, you did it wrong.  Bah humbug.

There were plenty of other topics to focus on.  The importance and effectiveness of strategy formulation and choice, concepts and analytic tools useful in developing strategic plans, the necessary steps for implementing a strategic plan, and how strategic direction information should be shared throughout an organization each were well represented. 

The summary request again included the now boilerplate text “tell me three things you learned and what you intend to do with it.”  At least it is consistent.  I kicked off my list of the “big three” for this week with communicating a strategic plan throughout an organization. I related a story of how I had shared some of the generic and grand strategies with the president of our company, along with my list of recommendations.  One of the nice things about working for a company where open discussion of corporate operations is encouraged is you can tell the president how you think he should be running the business- I didn’t really do that, it is just fun to say ;)   He responded with his list of selections and we overlapped in many areas, but the most informative comment was when he said “I’m not sure that meets the specific definition, but it is how we are thinking of things.  Now that I see it all in one spot, I’m not sure if we’ve ever communicated it this succinctly to the entire company”.  I thought this was pretty good timing considering the concept of deciding how, to whom, and when to communicate strategic intent within an organization was being discussed.

My choice for number two on the list of “what have you learned lately” was my surprise at how many people ask how big the company I work for is.  At least four times this week I related experiences from my company (something each instructor and professor has encouraged, including this one), and someone (including the instructor) has asked how big the company I work for is.  I’m not sure if this is a way of putting comments in context or more of a rationalization.  Many of the concepts we discuss in class are accompanied with examples from very large organizations, and perhaps that has slighted the average MBA student’s perception of small business.  As I’m getting a little tired of the subtext of “if you ain’t IBM you ain’t shit” I noted that based on my observations having worked for a small business for over seven years while simultaneously consulting for large businesses, these principles still apply to small business.  Many of the execution steps must be adapted to the small business environment, but the concepts are sound if applied with thought and good intent.

For my third item in this list of “what did you learn this week and how do you plan on using it” I noted the discussion in the text of short-term objectives, and in particular the concept of conflicting objectives and priorities.  This was a fun choice of a topic to highlight since the instructor had just commented that some long-term objectives I had proposed in a research paper seemed more like “well thought out tactics”.  I’ve never been so proud!  I’ll take “well thought out tactic” over generic long-term objectives any day of the week.

Grand Strategy Clusters and Dense Outlines

Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Week 3 Weekly Summary

This week introduced a large number of grand strategies, and by large I mean 12.  12 is not a large number for a lot of things, such as a count of hamburger buns or eggs.  It is the kind of number that makes me giggle like I’ve lost it when I see it appear as a third level bullet in the course concept outline.  That’s third level, as in ‘having two levels above it’, and it didn’t really stick out- meaning the outline ran long.  I’m talking about an outline of concepts that are going to be discussed over one week.  And that makes for a long week.  At some point the content gets so…what is the word I’m looking for? Broad, deep, dense—yes, definitely Dense- When the content gets so dense it just becomes a non-issue, like the exact shade of gray a particular square inch of aluminum is at the center of a 2 foot square cube of aluminum.  Very dense and no one cares.

There was an actually interesting concept this week called the model of grand strategy clusters.  This concept made the list of strategies more meaningful by demonstrating the relationship between the strategies.  This model arranged the dense list of grand strategies in clusters (who would have guessed that was coming?), four clusters to be exact.  These four were differentiated by two axis representing market growth (both slow and rapid) and competitive position (both strong and weak). 

I’m leaving this next bit in just to see how many hits this blog entry gets from search engines.  Ready, set, go!  The textbook had a discussion of strategic analysis and choice in single- or dominant-product businesses.  The text laid out a good discussion of how combining environmental factors with a company’s internal strengths and capabilities can provide a baseline for a strategic plan.

OK, here’s the story.  This blog gets a lot of hits apparently from students in similar classes.  I say that because the blog statistics show some of the search terms people use to arrive here.  And guess what?  Those search terms look surprisingly familiar, almost as if- alright, exactly as if—someone had typed phrases from the discussion questions I’ve seen professors use.  That previous paragraph was a search engine gold mine for people passing through this particular class.  Unfortunately, if a search lead you to that paragraph all I can offer you to help with your assignment is this; relax, settle in, and use the University Library resources (I’d suggest ProQuest) to do your research.  Out here on the wild webby west you’re going to just run into crack pots and snake oil salesmen. 

I have nothing to sell so I guess you can figure out which one I am.

Is ‘gaining a better understanding’ and ‘learning’ the same thing?

Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Week 2 Weekly Summary

This week built on the topics of environmental analysis and long-term objectives.  The somewhat annoying requirement to include three things each student learned this week in their weekly summary returned, but it was less annoying.  Same statement, just less bothersome now that I know it is simply another piece of the formula this instructor is using to operate the course.

It makes a lot of sense.  If I were facilitating (many of the instructors prefer that term to ‘teaching’, some have come out and said there isn’t a lot of teaching going on at this level) a course over and over I’d have my pre-programmed statements and assignments ready to roll out at the push of a button too.  These classes aren’t about the instructor- they are about being pushed to explore a topic and that leads to a better understanding of that topic (some people might even call it ‘learning’).

My first ‘what did you learn this week’ topic I noted was how favorably the mix of both consumer research and industry analysis was received in the simulation.  I had mentioned this in a discussion question response.  Research is fine, and getting focused is necessary, but it really caught my eye when the simulation highlighted how important it can be to cover both the customer viewpoint as well as the industry viewpoint- and vitally important to develop strategic plans from the combination of both.

For my second topic, I chose the discussion of challenges facing strategic planners.  The discussion in the text on corporations questioning strategic planning effectiveness in rapidly changing markets was something I hadn’t heard before, so it certainly qualified for the ‘what did you learn this week’ topic.

For my third topic, I commented on the way in which the simulation incorporated the global challenge, and noted that it was well thought out.  The company in the simulation had to consider the world market as both an opportunity (the company could choose to use overseas manufacturing) and a threat (low cost imports may take business away).  I think this was a particularly well crafted portion of the simulation and reflects that actual business climate companies operate in today.

For managing the homework this week I started a new process.  I broke down the parts I had to write into chunks that were about an hour or less in length.  Then I spread these across a simple table, indicating which day of the week I needed to do each chunk.  On a few days chunks got bumped to the following day, but for the most part I was able to make good progress during the week so the weekend didn’t end up as a big train wreck of writing to be done.  A nice tool, and although it took some time to break everything down having bite size chunks to deal with took some stress out of the week.