Articles on Strategic Management

Leadership and Management Processes

          Leadership

•    Leadership is to face challenge of developing or reestablishing a clean strategy.
•          The leader must provide the discipline to decide which industry changes & customer needs, the company will respond to, while avoiding organizational distractions & maintaining the company’s distinctiveness.
•          One of the leader’s jobs is to teach others in the org. about strategy, to say ‘No’ & to set limits.
•      The leader taking a company from nearly good to truly great.
•       He also includes right people with him & kick out wrong people from the org
•      A Leader allocates resources & brings new methods & processes into Org. This gives an opportunity to improvise & learn.
•       Changing processes & bringing best practices motivates the employees
•      He provides flexibility to his employees that bring innovation & autonomy in org. culture that is also big motivation for employees.
•       He believes transparent work culture & incentives are given on the basis of performance, employees should be part of org. change & innovation & recognition & growth opportunity also should be provided to them.
•     He should be good in environment scanning and he needs to change org. according to changing environment & he also needs to prepare employees to support him for that.

How employee motivation increases & their performance becomes better by learning, improvisation & innovation brought by leader?

-     There are mainly five levels

1.  Highly Capable individual

2.      Contributing team member.

3.      Competent manager.

4.      Effective leader

5.      Level 5 executives

 Level 5 executives are mostly combination of personal humility plus professional will.

 Management Processes: 


There are many management processes are used to improve efficiency, to reduce cost, to achieve better product quality & greater customer satisfaction. Some of them are

1.      Best Practices: They should be properly identified & implemented keeping in mind our org. culture & system.

2.      Total Quality Management: TQM is a commitment to continuous improvement in all phases of operations.

3.      Process Reengineering: Reengineering can be used first to produce a good basic design that yields dramatic improvement in performing business process.

4.      Motivational Practices for employees: Motivational practices cultivate commitment & winning attitudes among employees.

5.      Resource Allocation: All resources should be allocated properly to all divisions & proper planning should be done to arrange resources.

6.      Learning : All management processes at the end of the day lead to learning & experiencing new methods, systems.

           
Illustrations: 

General Electric: 


As a leader Jack Welch created mark in corporate world in the century.

-He gave direction to the company & set targets to be either “no.1 or no.2” or Fix, sell or close.

- He has retrenched some non performers & sold non profitable business.

- He included best people with passion & commitment, set stretched targets for them, gave autonomy & good incentives & rewards on good performance.

- He was risk takers & experimental. He introduced some ‘Best Practices’ of other org. in to GE. He introduced Six Sigma practice.

- He brought transparency & atmosphere of communication into GE through “Workout”.

- Not only top management but lower level employees also should be listened.

- Some of these practices were good to increase motivation of the employees.

- As per level 5 leader’s qualities he lacks humility in his character.

- “Best Practices”, “Work Out”, “Hire & Fire” & “Six Sigma” were some of the processes he brought & that played major role in GE’s success.

China Netcom: 


Edward Tian was brought into the company with specific target- the fulfillment of the very reason for existence of China Netcom.

- He through the company had the mandate of preparing China for the internet boom by breaking the monopoly of public limited giants.

- His strategy of creating a backbone & then ensuring that he capitalized on it is an example of how he brought about changes, without loosing sight of the core reason-preparing china for internet boom.

- He successfully implemented this strategy. Since he himself believed in the mission & ensured that the others believed in that as well.

TCIL: 


TCIL was witnessing significant quality problems apart from financial troubles, loss of market share.

-          Bhusan Raina closed down the loss- making HDP, introduced VRS, focused on the customers such as the organized market etc.

-          He also introduced changes in the organization structure, was responsible for challenging conventional thinking & introduced incentive schemes.

-          He also used his good officers to ensure that banks did not take the company into BIFR etc.

-          Some Processes were introduced & changed in diff functional areas.

-          Finance: It had gone for Debt restructuring.

-         H&R: It did downsizing, introduced effective VRS schemes, & managed union & labors very well.

-          Operations of the plant: To enhance the capacity utilization, it started

1.      Competing TBEM Award

2.      Implementing Total Operating Performance Initiatives.

3.      Implementing Total Productivity Management

-          Marketing : It started

1.      Price initiatives

2.      Market Choice

3.      Product development effort.