MAKING STRATEGY - LEARNING BY DOING

Companies find it difficult to change strategy for many reasons, but o ne stands out: strategic thinking is not a core managerial competence at most companies. Executives hone their capabilities by tackling prob lems over and over again. Changing strategy, however, is not usually a task that they face repeatedly. Once companies have found a strategy that works, they want to use it, not change it. Consequently, most man agers do not develop a competence in strategic thinking. This Manager' s Tool Kit presents a three-stage method executives can use to conceiv e and implement a creative and coherent strategy themselves. The first stage is to identify and map the driving forces that the company need s to address. The process of mapping provides strategy-making teams wi th visual representations of team members' assumptions; those pictures , in turn, enable managers to achieve consensus in determining the dri ving forces. Once a senior management team has formulated a new strate gy, it must align the strategy with the company's resource-allocation process to make implementation possible. Senior management teams can t ranslate their strategy into action by using aggregate project plannin g. And management teams that link strategy and innovation through that planning process will develop a competence in implementing strategic change. The author guides the reader through the three stages of strat egy making by examining the case of a manufacturing company that was l osing ground to competitors. After mapping the driving forces, the com pany's senior managers were able to devise a new strategy that allowed the business to maintain a competitive advantage in its industry.