Learning and Development:  Strategic Thinking

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Strategic Thinking:  Course Introduction

This intensive business strategy training course is designed to equip managers and leaders with the tools and techniques that they need to make an immediate impact in their businesses.  Specifically, this training course recognises that strategy is no longer a formal once a year process.  We have left behind the concepts of the corporate planning department and the rigid top down annual planning process.  The competitive environment is just too volatile and uncertain to allow such approaches.

Business strategy – the search for competitive advantage in the marketplace – is a way of thinking that characterises successful managers and corporate leaders.  The objective of this intensive workshop based strategy training programme is to change the way that delegates view and gather information about their current and future marketplaces.  Simply, this training programme aims to transform delegates into visionaries, better able to predict, identify and rapidly take advantage of future strategic opportunities for their businesses.  A typical training programme is described below.  This framework can be changed to meet your exact needs and clients have used it to explore real client and market based opportunities using case studies and exercises written especially for the strategy training workshop.

Programme Content Summary

This typically one to two day intensive programme places special emphasis on (i) building future business scenarios (ii)  identifying new emerging sources of enduring competitive advantage and (iii) understanding the challenges of implementation.  Content includes:

• What is ‘strategy’?  A seven-point test that determines if any organisation really has got a winning strategy.

• Building the vision – understanding the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ level forces that can reshape the marketplace.

• Reinventing the rules of the game.  Understand the five key questions that you need to ask to see if your organisation can turn the tables on the competition and reinvent the marketplace.  This session draws on the experiences of Direct Line, easyJet, Dell and Amazon.

• Generic strategy.  Understand the new generic strategies - sources of competitive advantage - for the 21st century.

• How to analyse clients and identify their real needs.

• Looking at competitors and matching their capabilities with yours.

• Organisational analysis.  Analyse the strategic strengths and weaknesses of your organisation.

• Where could it all go wrong?  An examination of ten common sources of failure when implementing business strategies.

This programme focuses on providing delegates with tools that they can use straight away to (a) develop, communicate and implement strategies and (b) present complex concepts such as competitor analysis in a straightforward manner.

Outcomes

After this training programme delegates will have a practical appreciation of:

• What a successful strategy really looks like and how to test their own organisations’ strategy.

• Drivers of change in the marketplace and how to build future scenarios.

• Michael Porter’s five forces model – application and limitations.

• Why generic strategies must change.

• What to look for to see if is possible to completely change the rules of the competitive game in their business sectors.

• How to identify customers' needs.

• How to analyse competitors.

• How to communicate strategy using simple graphical tools.

• The successful path to implementation.