The role of strategy

                                                     

Strategy…Whether you are a big business or a SME, this is an important driver of your business growth and carries it ahead on the right track.  You need to make a concrete strategy to mobilize and optimize your resources in an efficient way. Many organizations fail to capitalize on their strengths, resources and skills and accelerate their growth due to lack of a clear strategy.  On the contrary organizations that prosper and achieve remarkable results are seen to be driven by a clear and properly outlined strategy.  Strategy is not an indivisible plan, but a composition of several sub-plans integrated into a whole.  Of course a defining goal characterizes the strategy and all activities are carried out to give effect to that end. The final objective of an organization is not achieved a by a strategy that is uniform across all departments and functions, but through a harmonious fusion of different strategies and the synergies produced by them.   

A strategy for one organization may differ from the strategy of another organization even though there is a commonality in scale, category or a target group.  An organization’s inherent values, its worldview and its commitments to the community could be major differentiating parameters and shape its strategy in a distinct way. Adaptation of technology, alacrity with which one responds to consumer feedback and the communication plan of an organization also influence the overall strategy of an organization.  For example,  In a complex organization with multiple structures, layers and command panel, strategy for growth is quite different from an organization that is simple and organically built. The former needs restoration of simplicity to ward off operational inconveniences arising out of a command inter-loop, decision overlapping and a skewed information spread.    They need simple operational controls and an efficient knowledge management framework   to overcome the noise and information mismanagement. In the later case the strategy should mostly focus on leveraging the lean organizational structure, transparent information management and free cross flow of ideas HR planning is less cumbersome in the case of the latter than in the case of the previous.

Organizational culture has also a huge bearing on development of a right strategy whether its product planning, choosing the right portfolio of products, marketing and communication planning etc. Marketing strategy and media strategies are largely influenced by the character of the product or service and the target base as has been defined and determined by the higher management and that in other way depends on the broader vision and outlook of the organization.  How much customer friendly or in broader terms people friendly the organization is can be ascertained from their strategic planning process.   An organization that cares little for its corporate social responsibility and the community adopts a different strategy than the organization where people are the focus of attention.

There is very little scope for identical strategies for organizations if they genuinely care for their expansion, so it leads to developing their distinct strategies and here the intervention of a unprejudiced strategic development process is required that can foresee the impending dangers, forecast about it and suggest prescriptive measures which sometimes may lead to a major deviation or restructuring of the strategy of an organization.