Strategy design

CHAPTER 3 – STRATEGY DESIGN

 

AIMS OF THE CHAPTER
The first chapter of the book showed how the three main concerns for the design of a strategy are the organisation’s purpose, its external environment and its internal features.  The last chapter discussed the concept of a business environment – and this chapter looks at an organisation’s internal features.  In particular, we see how managers can design a strategy that allows their organisation to succeed.  The basis of this design is a strategic fit between the organisation and its environment.  

The aim of the chapter is to describe some general principles of strategy design.  More specific aims are to:

• Discuss the purpose of strategy design.

The three most important factors for a strategy are the organisation’s purpose, its external environment and its internal features.  The environment is largely fixed, so the essence of strategy design has managers designing the aims and internal features that enable an organisation to succeed within its business environment.  Some specific requirements are that a strategy focuses on the long-term purpose of the organisation, is realistic, appropriate, achievable, comprehensive, responsible, agreed, and in tune with corporate culture. 

• Appreciate the concept of strategic fit

Strategic fit means that an organisation fit comfortably into its business environment.  When managers design an organisation’s aims and internal features properly, it can work well within its environment – and it is said to have good strategic fit.  This suggests a certain harmony between the organisation and its environment. 

• Describe a general approach to strategy design

There is no single, best approach to designing a strategy.  A general approach is based on the rather vague advice of ‘analysis, choice and implementation’.  More specifically, we can expand the approach outlined in chapter 1 which has stages to define the overall purpose, analyse the environment, analyse the internal operations, design a strategy and implement the results.  We expand this approach in later chapters.

• Consider the design and contents of a mission.

A mission sets the long term direction of an organisation and usually contains its purpose, values, strategy and general standards of behaviour.  Sometimes it includes statements about long-term survival and independence, improving performance, and accomplishment of specific goals.  This statement gives the basic shape of the organisation and the way that it works.  Unfortunately, getting agreement is often more difficult than it seems, especially when there are dominant stakeholders. 

• Consider the expansion of a mission into goals and objectives

After agreeing a mission, managers have to expand it into a series of more specific goals and objectives.  Goals give targets for the organisation in general terms; objectives translate these into more positive – preferably quantitative – statements.  Essentially, the mission gives the purpose, goals show the areas where targets are needed, and objectives show the actual targets to be reached.  Common strategic goals and objectives refer to finance, markets, operations, relations with employees, geographical scope, personal aims of managers and conforming to external controls.  These are expanded into targets for lower levels in the organisation – giving a mechanism for implementing the strategy, and leading to ever-more detailed decisions. 

• List the different people who may design a strategy

There are basically four options for this:

• an individual or very small group of senior managers
• a wider team of senior managers drawn from the organisation to work on strategic design alongside their other work
• a permanent, dedicated department set up for the sole purpose of strategic management
• outside specialists who can take an objective view of the organisation and use their broader experience to plot a realistic future. 

In practice, there are many permutations of these four options.

• Outline the effects of management styles on design

The choice of people to design the strategy, and the way that they design it, depends to a large extent on the prevailing culture and management style.  Four relevant styles are:

• rational decision makers (who design a strategy based on formal analyses)
• administrators (who see themselves as making routine decisions in line with imposed guidelines)
• entrepreneurial (where a strong leader does the design)
• pragmatic (where managers wait to see what happens before making a decision). 

• Discuss the differences between top-down and bottom-up design

Top-down design is the traditional approach where senior managers design the strategy and pass this down through a series of steps in the organisation until it reaches operational level.  Bottom-up emerging, assumes that the real driver of strategy is the capabilities that are developed at lower levels, and these really define the organisation’s best long-term direction.  With top-down design, senior managers make the decisions, but with bottom-up emerging they may start with basic ideas, but circumstances and actual operations alter these and influence the final strategy.  In effect, senior managers only observe, discuss, negotiate and consolidate distinctive capabilities into a formal strategy.  In practice, most organisations use some combination of top-down design and bottom-up emergence.  

• Describe different types of generic strategy

Each organisation develops its own strategy, but there are some common patterns that define a much smaller number of generic strategies.  For example, each supermarket develops its own strategy, but these are usually based on wide choice, low cost and convenience.  Some generic strategies are relevant to the corporate level, and consider factors like development of a single business, growth, diversification, vertical integration and retrenchment.  Others are relevant at a business level and consider factors like cost leadership, product differentiation and niche markets.  Others are relevant at a functional level – and we develop this theme in later chapters.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• As competing organisations work in the same business environment, are there significant differences in the strategies that are open to them?

Yes – in the way that an antique bookseller, a specialised travel bookshop and Amazon.com all sell books, but they have completely different strategies that lead to different operations.  But it is true that successful companies often adopt similar strategies (as we mentioned above, with supermarkets seeming to adopt very similar strategies).  And if one organisation succeeds, others are likely to adopt their strategies to try and duplicate their success. 

• The aim of every business is to make as much profit as possible.  Anything else is playing with words.  What do you think of this view?

No – there are several problems with this view.  Not all organisations are businesses, but many are not-for-profit, government organisations, social groups, and so on.  Then there is the problem of defining profit and the interpretation of accounting conventions; and the constraints of legal and ethical operations; and defining the period over which profit is to be maximised; the deciding whose view of profit is used, and a whole range of other practical considerations.

• The design of a strategy starts with purpose, and then moves on to strategic goals and objectives, and then downwards through other layers of the organisation.  Is this a sensible approach, or are there better alternatives?

In principle, it is a reasonable approach.  It gives a way of translating the plans of senior managers (or the dominant stakeholders) down to actual operations.  However, senior managers are generally remote from operations and have little appreciation of their detail, or the full implications of their decisions.  Hence the alternative view that operations strategy should be designed by those most closely involved, with senior managers only formalising their results into a consolidated strategy.  Between the two extremes, are many variations on the approach to design.

• What are ‘key success factors’ and why are they important?

When the mission is agreed managers set about expanding it into a sequence of ever more-detailed objectives and goals.  There are no analyses to identify reasonable objectives, so managers set them by judgement, discussion and agreement.  Often they are based on key success factors (KSFs), which are the small number of factors that customers really value, and which affect their choice of products and suppliers.  To be competitive, an organisation must be competent in all the KSFs, and it should excel in at least one of them. 

• With at least three levels of strategy above people actually doing the work, organisations are clearly top-heavy with unproductive planners.  What can organisations do to reduce these overheads?

This is a good point, as many organisations seem to be top heavy with assorted layers of planners.  For example, local governments seem to have many more people planning than actually doing the work.  In principle, organisations should employ strategic managers until their marginal contribution declines to zero.  In practice, the products of strategic managers are so hazy that it is impossible to put a value on them.  So the general advice is to continually review staff levels and make sure that management overheads do not become excessive.  A complicating factors is that when an organisation is successful, it is difficult to argue that the strategic manager are not doing a good job and even more should be employed; but when times get hard, there is a tendency to keep the strategic managers to see the company through its short-term problems, while sacking the lower level people doing the work.

• The key factor in strategy design is to put the right people in charge.  Who might these people be, and how might they approach the design of a strategy?

It is always important to put the right people in charge of any activity.  Of course, the problem is deciding who these are.  There four options for strategy design are an individual or very small group of senior managers, a wider team of senior managers drawn from the organisation, a dedicated department, or outside specialists.  The choice, and their approach, depends to a large extent on the prevailing culture.  But these options concentrate on the traditional view of top-down design, and a body of opinion says that emerging strategy is far more important.  This view says that the people who notionally design the strategy are less important than the system for formalising the emerging options. 

• Senior managers are paid a lot of money.  Their main job is to design a strategy that steers the organisation in the right long-term direction.  But if strategy really emerges from the bottom-up, what are the senior managers doing, and why are they paid so much?

People often ask this question – especially when senior managers are advised not to put too much emphasis on their role in designing strategy.  Presumably, they are paid for doing other types of work – and their salaries are justified on the basis of contribution to the organisation, and competitive industry rates.

• Managers know what their own organisation can achieve, and a strategy must be based on its internal strengths.  But they can never understand every aspect of the business environment, or even the likely actions of competitors, so they should not waste time trying.  Do you agree with this introspective view?

No – this view suggests that an organisation can work in isolation, somehow insulated from its environment.  Then it might develop highly efficient operations, and build distinctive capabilities – but make products that no-one actually wants.  Managers always need to balance the needs of internal operations and the external environment.  They may not be able to understand every aspect of this environment, but they can find out enough to make reasonable decisions.

 

IDEAS IN PRACTICE
Shokisumai Industries
Aim: to list the types of factor that a company can develop into a competitive advantage. 

Organisations want to develop capabilities that give a sustainable competitive advantage.  Without some kind of distinctive capability, there is nothing to distinguish an organisation’s products, and no reason for customers to prefer them.  This is typical of a commodity market.  In principle, organisations can build almost any aspect of their operations into a competitive advantage.  However, there are some common options, such as low costs, speed, reliability and so on.  Shokisumai Industries identify five general areas where they develop a capability – market features and relations with customers, product features, availability of resources, use of resources and relationships with stakeholders.  This list – with a few adjustments – is relevant for almost any other organisation.

Tarmac
Aim: to suggest the type of mission that is found in a major construction company

The most common contents of a mission are statements about purpose, values, strategy and standards of behaviour.  These come in an almost endless variety of formats and details.  The example of Tarmac illustrates how these can appear in practice, with the company clearly stating it position.

Lufthansa Aviation Group
Aim: to show the mission of a major service provider, and suggest the way that this can be expanded to lower levels

The mission becomes the basis for strategic goals and objectives, which cascade down to lower decisions.  This case in Lufthansa shows the initial steps in this movement.  The first part of their mission outlines their purpose, and the second part begins to expand this into strategic goals.  It mentions ‘market leadership’ and prepares the way for more detailed decisions by talking about specific areas like reliability, punctuality and punctuality.  The third part of the mission looks at their responsibilities towards different stakeholders.  The next steps would be to expand these goals into more specific objectives, and then into more details goals. 

Microsoft
Aim: the last case showed how a mission can be expanded into more detailed goals and objectives; this case gives an example of this move down from corporate to business level. 

As you would imagine, Microsoft has a very clear and well-presented mission that shows its purpose and the values that help it to succeed.  The mission gives a review of how Microsoft approach their work.  But – perhaps not  surprisingly – the mission is slightly eccentric.  Rather than listing their types of products, it describes the way that they take on big challenges and see them through, and use constructive self-criticism.  Eventually, these hazy aspirations have to be translated into more practical forms, so that Microsoft continue to supply products that customers buy.  This is done in the seven core business units.  Each of these considers the products that it makes, and designs an appropriate business strategy to support the corporate strategy and mission.

Oakland Bay Investment Trust
Aim: to outlines the factors that an investment company considers important in a company that it might invest in. 

This case suggests the factors that one investment company considers most important for the long-term success of a company.  They clearly emphasise the role of senior management in formulating and implementing a reasonable strategy.  In particular, they look for a convincing mission that explicitly includes profit, and a business strategy of either working in an inherently attractive industry or having distinctive capabilities that give high rewards in the chosen industry.  Most significantly, the investment trust then looks for an operations strategy that can deliver the business strategy.  So a clearer link is developing between the overall organisational purpose and the way that this is achieved through an operations strategy.      

PepsiCo, Inc
Aim: to outline the effects of a strategy that changes over time

PepsiCo’s is one of the world’s best known companies, whose overriding objective is ‘to increase the value of our shareholders' investment through integrated operating, investing and financing activities’.  This is developed in the corporate strategy which focuses on growing businesses, both through internal growth and acquisitions.  At a business level, distinctive capabilities are implicit in the company’s statement that their ‘success is the result of superior products, high standards of performance, distinctive competitive strategies and the high level of integrity of our people’.  Although they have a clearly stated strategy, it follows common patterns that appear in many other organisations – effectively using generic strategies.  These strategies have changed markedly over recent years, as the company moved from diversification to retrenchment and then development of its core activities.

 

CASE STUDY – CARREFOUR
Carrefour is Europe’s largest retailer, with its success built on a rapidly expanding chain of hypermarkets.  Alongside this, it has four other shop formats, for meeting various types of demand.  At present, its strategy is based on expanding three of these formats internationally. 

• How would you describe the Carrefour group’s strategy?  How do the different levels of strategy fit together?

Carrefour has an explicit corporate strategy of rapidly expanding its three main types of store – hypermarkets, supermarkets and hard discounters – internationally.  It aims to build market share in each country in which it works by ‘expanding the type of retailing best suited to the local market and by taking advantage of the way the three formats complement one another’.  The three store formats work together to achieve the corporate strategy.  And at the same time, each works in its market segment with its own business strategy.  This, again, is based on expansion and succeeding in its chosen market segment, by providing low costs, high customer service, availability, and so on.  Within each business, the functions ensure efficient operations for logistics, retailing and all the other associated functions needed to support the business strategy.

• How do the strategies affect the operations in their stores?

The strategies show what Carrefour wants to do, but these plans have to be implemented and translated into actual operations.  In this case, the strategies call for expansion, made possible by meeting the specific demands of each market, high quality customer service, low prices and high quality products.  The operations within each store must be designed to achieve these.  This involves thousands of separate decisions about operations to define and deliver their ‘product package’.  The operations are responsible for delivering the services and goods that allow Carrefour to achieve its business strategies. 

• What are Carrefour’s distinctive capabilities and competitive advantages?

The company explicitly mentions its strengths in running different store formats, meeting the specific demands of every market, giving high quality customer service, low prices and high quality products.  These are the obvious capabilities, but they are supported by others, such as efficient logistics, use of finances, procurement, and so on. 

• How do the strategies compare with those of other retailers?

Despite intense competition in the retail industry in general, and supermarkets in particular, many countries have one company that gains a dominant position.  In the USA it is Wal-Mart, in the UK it is Tesco, in France it is Carrefour.  These leading companies often adopt similar strategies – which are based on the principles of efficient operations, low cost, customer service, expansion, and so on.  Strategies based on these are obviously successful.  In this sense the strategies of Carrefour are similar to those of other major, companies.

However, there are other companies who compete in different ways.  For example, many shops focus on specialised products, local markets, very high quality, convenience, and so on.  As with any industry, a range of strategies is possible and managers have to select the most appropriate.