Market Oriented Strategic Planning

A summary: From Strategy to Implementation: Seeking Alignment

Submitted To:
Dr. Prantosh Banerjee

Submitted By: Group 8

Aastha Tulsyan (190201002)
Himanshu Ninawat (190201039)
Sakshi Shah (190201089)
Shivam Garg (190201096)
Shubham Chauhan (190201101)
Shubham Gupta (190201102)
Utsav Sharma (190201120)
Many executives enjoy strategizing. Strategy, however, is nothing but hot air if equal or more
attention is not given to the harder next step- implementation. “Implementation describes the
concrete measures that translate strategic intent into actions that produce results”.
Implementation is operations oriented and requires continuous managerial attention at all
levels.
Difference between Strategy creation and Implementation can be understood by the keywords
associated with them:
Strategy Creation
Implementation
Analysis and Planning
Execution
Thinking
Doing
Initiate Follow
through
At the top Top-to-
bottom
Entrepreneurial
Operational
Goal setting Goal-achieving
Strategy in the absence of effective implementation is pointless. Strategy is not the tool for
differentiation as any rival can duplicate. What matters more is the ability to execute it well.
Having understood the importance of strategy, let us move towards alignment. A successful
strategy formed around a coherent and reinforcing set of supporting practices and structures.
Generally, the four elements of alignment are strategy, processes, people (employees), and
customers. Generally, alignment is a situation in which strategic goals are supported by
organizational structures, support systems, processes, human skills, resources, and incentives.

Elements of strategy alignment involves the following:

1. People: Senior management has a responsibility to communicate strategic intent to
employees, and mid- and lower-level managers must reiterate that intent and translate
it into the way their subordinates work. Manager must ensure that the company has
people with right skills to make the strategy successful, people with right attitude to
support the strategy and th resources for people to do their jobs well.
2. Incentives: Unless employees have real incentives to implement the startegy, they
will not commit to it and the strategy will probably fail. The best assurance of
implementation is a rewards system that aligns employees‟ interests with the success
 of the strategy. Therefore, every unit and every employee should have measurable
performance goals with clearly stated rewards for goal achievement (i.e. rewards large
enough to elicit the desired level of employee effort)
3. Supportive activities: The strategy must be supported by other university key
activities for example customer service, operations, hiring and training, and other
activities that interlock the support system.
4. Organizational structure: Manager should review if company’s people, resources
and units are aligned to the company’s strategy or not, if the units are optimally
organised to achieve those goals or not? Reorganizing people and material in support
of a new strategy is instructive and useful
5. Culture and Leadership: Culture and leadership must be supportive of both the
strategy and the day-to-day work that implements it. Culture refers to a company’s
values, traditions, and operating style. Companies with strong cultures are wise to
adopt strategies consistent with their cultures. Companies that find themselves in
competitively dead-end positions, however, adopt strategies that are at odds with their
existing cultures.
If culture change is necessary, changing company culture to better align with the new
strategy is the responsibility of the CEO and the senior management team. This can be
done by:
1. Identify the aspect if culture that must change in support of strategy
implementation
2. Model the behaviour and values that you’d like employees to adopt
3. Engage employees in “town meetings” forums to build consensus and
commitment to change
4. Sponsor celebratory events when change milestones are met
5. Set high performance standards.
6. Reward people for the results you seek.

Table 1 shows the checklist you can use to review the alignment concepts explained above