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Chapter one

Before starting the course, I was thinking about why the university considered this course

as the final course. So, I made myself prepare to use all the knowledge and experience I have

learned in University Canada West to understand better the concepts I will learn in this course

from Italian godfather, Michele Vincenti. After the first class, and reading the first chapter of the

required book, I prepare some of my understanding in the following sentences.

Leaders should always be aware to anticipate the change, recognize the resource, capability

of the company, and evaluate the strategies continuously and continually. Every organization is
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always looking for a competitive advantage, and they wanted to inject this into their DNA, by

integrating it with its corporate and general strategy. The importance of this task can be explained

by the rise and decline of Borders corporation, which their story started in 1971, and finished in

2011. This company was unable to define its IT governance and integrated its IT strategy with its

corporate strategy, and interestingly, AMAZON hunted this traditional retail’s share market. In

defining the competitive advantage, every organization can define its definition. On the one hand,

for Dollarama recognizing itself as the cheapest place for finding cheap food is considered as a

competitive advantage. On the other hand, for Rolex, being unique considered as the corporate

strategy.

In this chapter, I found the interesting concept of two different views of leadership, which

are (1) external control view, and (2) romantic. In my opinion, both of this leadership view can be

right. For example, although today’s economy is unpredictable, the right leader can choose the

most suitable strategy, and modify the general and corporate strategy. To put it in another way,

after the election of president trump, the united state started to cancel some international agreement

with other countries and set new rules, tariffs, and regulation both for export and import. So, these

external forces can lead to changing the fate of some international companies if their leaders cannot

define a new strategy to increase their profits and market shares. Even for an American company,

the romantic view can justify that in this unfair market against international companies, the leaders

can reach their company to success, but not be depending on to core competency, by defining and

integrating new strategy into their DNA.

A good example can be WEBVAN’s failure, a huge investment in the dot-com bubble, this

case can justify why those mart and well-known guys were wrongly defining WEBVAN’s

corporate strategy by poor analyzing the organization, market’s growth, and the customer’s needs.
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In defining their corporate strategy, the aggressive expansion, and direct acquisition were defined.

In my opinion, in the WEBVAN’s organization, those leaders were focusing too much on

operational effectiveness. However, the expectation should be based on the reality not the

imagination of a board of directors. Every failure will teach us new lessons, and AMAZON by

recruiting some of those failed managers, avoid the life-killing mistake of WEBVAN.

Strategic management process

For strategic management , three processes of analysis, decisions (formulation), and

actions (implementation) should be used continuously, and this united process can help us to reach

to a competitive advantage.

It is critical to recognize the concept of corporate and general strategy from operational

effectiveness. Operation effectiveness can be defined as a way that a company uses to have a

competitive advantage in doing the operational tasks such as removing bottlenecks, improving

throughput time. In my opinion, most of the Japanese companies use from operational

effectiveness in comparison to their rivals in North America, which focus on defining strategy.

There four important points that should be considered in strategic management: (1) being in direct

relationship with goals and objectives of organization, (2) the role of stakeholders, which can be

from the owners to customers, (3) covering both short and long-term perspectives of company,

and (4) choosing when we should do the right thing (effectiveness), and when we should do the

things right (efficiency). Also, I learn about “ambidexterity,” which defined as the ability to think

about the long-term view, while taking advantages of the current situation.
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Strategic analysis

Strategic analysis is defined as the analysis of a company’s environment internally and

externally, which can help the top management to define a suitable strategy that fits the situation.

In this stage, the following analysis should be done:

 Goals and objectives

 External environment

 Internal environment

 Intellectual assets

Strategy formulation

In this stage, we formulate how to build competitive advantages and how to sustain it. This

can be done on several levels.

 Business level strategy (cost leadership, differentiation)

 Corporate level strategy (what business we are in, and the ways the company can manage

the business’s portfolio)

 International strategy (suitable strategies we need in our international joint-venture)

 Entrepreneurial Strategy and Competitive Dynamics (the ways we can increase value)

Strategy implementation

In this stage, we made the necessary action to control all the activity related to the

company’s business, and these activities are (1) control in strategic and corporate governance, (2)

effective organizational design, (3) leaning organization with an ethical approach, (4) developing

Corporate Entrepreneurship.
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Managing the Shareholders

To help corporate governance, we can manage these people as the board of directors acts

as their representatives. This representative can control that the alignment of the leader’s interest

to the shareholders’ interest. For this purpose, even the personal relationship of directors with

executive managers should be investigated.

Intended strategy and realized strategy

I learned about the concepts of intended strategy and realized strategy. In intended strategy,

decision is made based on the analysis, and in realized strategy, for determining the decisions, we

use from different inputs such as analysis, managerial preferences, unpredictable developments

and limitation in the environment.

Stakeholder management’s view

There are two kinds of view: (1) zero-sum, which means there is competition for gaining

the resources and there is a loser and winner in this competition, (2) symbiosis, in which the

stakeholder’s performance is dependent to each other, and these people can receive mutual well-

being, it is a win-win situation. As it can be predicted, in the first view, the rate of conflicts is

higher than the second view, and this should be considered in designing the relationship with

stakeholders.

Social responsibility

Although companies first target reaching the financial objectives, they should consider that

they have a responsibility towards people and the community. In my opinion, the problems that

companies such as NIKE and Kimberly-Clark had experienced because they were ignored their

responsibility in the non-market section. In fact, they did not define their non-market strategy, and

as a result, they faced punishment from their customers.

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Triple bottom line

For solving the potential problems, the concept of the triple bottom can help companies to

evaluate its performance in a different aspect of financial, environmental and social. In this way,

sustainable benefits can be reached through the business.

Strategic management and people

It should be noted that strategic management should be aligned with objectives, mission,

and vision of the organizations, and in this way, all the people in different levels in the organization

should understand this approach and have participated in this process.

Strategic Management and relationship with Mission, Vision, and Objectives

Strategic management should have coherence with objectives, mission, and visions. For

this purpose, in defining the objectives, it should be considered that these objectives should be

‘SMART.’ It means that objectives should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and

timely.

Learning in chapter 1

The first chapter helped me to know more details about several concepts. Interestingly, I

have learned that a company even by not having a strategy can be successful in its business,

however, if that company defines a strategy, it can help it to sustain its success over the long-term.

A company by having a strategy can make itself recognizable from others, and this difference can

bring competitive advantage for this company. In this regard, by understanding the difference of

techniques with strategy, I can now understand why some Japanese companies had good

performance as they only focused on improving techniques, not strategies. For my personal

development, I would like to link more the concept of strategic leadership, which I learned in a

leadership course with professor Vincenti, to the information I learned in this chapter.
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