-Corporate Culture and Management
Week 1
Art. Jones & George (2009): Mission, Vision, Strategy
Strategy =
1960: a term that originates from armed forces.
1962: the determination of the basic long-term goals of an enterprise, and the adaption of
courses of actions and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals.
1980: the essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its
environment.
Contingency theory:
Planning = identifying and selecting appropriate goals and courses of actions, one of the four
principle acts of management.
Levels of planning:
- Corporate level plan = top management’s decisions pertaining to the organization’s
mission, vision, strategy, and structure; CEO, corporate office.
Strategy = a plan that indicates in which industries and national markets an
organization intends to compete.
- Business or division level plan = division’s managers’ decisions pertaining to
division’s long-term goals, overall strategy and structure.
Strategy = a plan that indicates how a division intends to compete against its rivals.
- Functional level plan = functional managers’ decisions pertaining to be goals that they
propose to pursue to help the division attain its business-level goals; manufacturing,
marketing, accounting, etc.
Strategy = a plan of action to improve the ability of each of an organization’s
functions to perform its task-specific activities in ways that add value to the firm’s
goods.
Why is planning important?
- Planning is necessary to give direction and purpose.
- Planning involves managers in decision-making about goals and strategies.
- Planning helps managers to coordinate the different activities in the same direction.
- A plan can be used for controlling managers: responsibility and accountability.
Organization change strategy to deal with the challenges of external adaption and internal
integration. It often involves changes in:
- Organizational structure.
- Systems.
- Staff and skills.
- Culture and shared valued.
- Leadership and management.
Financial strategy = deals with the financial challenges of the company. This often involves:
- Your funding objectives and how these relate to your mission.
- Your income aims for the next three to five years, including your ideal income mix for
the next three to five years.
, - Where you hope to increase or decrease income, for example “we want to increase
our traded income 25% over the next three years”.
Five types of marketing strategies:
- Product leadership
- Cost leadership / operational excellence.
- Customer intimacy.
- Experience.
- Community building.
Three major steps in planning:
I. Determining the organization’s mission and goals. Why?
Mission, vision / situational analysis.
II. Formulating a strategy. What?
III. Implementing strategy. How? Monitoring / change management.
Ia. Where are we now?
Mission = the essential purpose of the organization, concerning particularly why it is in
existence, the mature of the business it is in and the customers it seeks to serve and satisfy.
- Who are we / what do we do / who are our customers / what are our values?
- Focusses on the present.
Ib. Where do we want to go?
Vision = a powerful message that tells people how you view the future of your business.
- Where are we going as an organization?
- What do we want to achieve?
- What is unique and important?
II. What to do: organizational strategy.
- The mission and vision are translated into goals.
- Strategy is a cluster of related managerial decisions and actions to help an
organization to attain these goals.
III. How? Implementation requires change.
- Putting strategy into action.
- Allocating responsibilities.
- Detailed action plans.
- Timetable including SMART goals.
- Allocating resources.
- Holding responsibilities accountable.
Strategic leadership = the ability of the CEO and top managers to convey a compelling vision
of what they want the organization to achieve to their subordinates.
McKinsey’s 7S model:
- Strategy is closely linked to other element of the
organizations.
- 7S addresses the critical role of coordination, rather than
structure, in organizational effectiveness.
, Week 2
Chapter 12: Characteristic of leaders
Leadership = the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of
goals.
Management = controls or directs people and resources according to principles or values
that have been established.
Leaders have people who follow them, managers have people who work for them.
Six leadership styles:
Trait theories of leadership:
- Leaders are born, not made.
- Theories that consider personal qualities and characteristics that differentiate leaders
from non-leaders.
- Importance of personality.
- Extraversion, dominance, confidence.
- Dark side traits; Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy.
Dark side traits:
- Machiavellianism = a psychological trait centered on cold and manipulative behavior.
- Narcissism = leadership style in which the leader is only interested in themselves – at
expense of others. Includes arrogance, dominance, and hostility.
- Psychopathy = multiple personas, often charming to staff above their level in the
hierarchy but abusive to staff below their level, no mercy.
Behavioral theories of leadership:
- Leaders can be made, not necessarily born.
- Theories that assume that people can be trained to be leaders.
- Initiating structure: creating clarity about roles and tasks.
- Consideration: trust, respect, and regard for feelings.
Cultural differences:
- High consideration works best in countries that support participative decision-making
(collectivism).