Business Strategy Toolkit

Business Strategy Toolkit

Having a clear and focused business strategy is critically important to the success of an organization.

Without a well-defined business strategy, enterprises have been known to stall or even fail. Experts say If you can take the emotion out of your decision-making process, you’ll have a business and a team that is more focused, more productive, and more profitable.

An effective business strategy establishes in a clear, concise direction for an organization and how this will be achieved, including detailed action plans.

Business strategies are also about making choices, establishing priorities, allocating resources to strategic initiatives and coordinating to achieve desired results.

A business strategy defines clear lines of accountability and timelines for achieving expected results on the agreed strategic initiatives.

Creating a business strategy is not difficult, but it does take time and focus to get right.

Of course, focusing on a business strategy is not always that easy when you’re busy running a business. Yet, business strategy experts advise business owners to try and make some time to step out of their business and think about what they really want to get from it.

An effective business strategy serves as a blueprint for the different aspects of running your business, from hiring to organizational structure. When the strategy matches the company’s long-term vision, it helps ensure that everyone is working toward the same goals.

A well thought out business strategy drives decisions about how to allocate resources, both human and material. The strategy also helps set priorities when resources aren’t available to do everything at once.

When everyone within the organization understands the business strategy, it creates a framework to keep everyone working in the same direction. Though it is critically important to any business that wants to survive and thrive, business strategy is just one component.

The process of creating a business strategy allows you to identify and evaluate your company’s strengths and weaknesses so you can create a strategy that optimizes your strengths and compensates for or eliminates your weaknesses.

Analysts recommend keeping “efficiency” in mind when developing a business strategy. A business strategy allows you to effectively allocate resources for your business activities, which automatically makes you more efficient. It also helps you plan ahead for deadlines, allocate job roles and stay on track for your project goals.

Also look for competitive advantages. By identifying a clear plan for how you will reach your goals, you can focus on capitalizing on your strengths, using them as a competitive advantage that makes your company unique in the marketplace.

All that said, creating a business strategy that’s in line with the vision you have for your company takes time and development. For example, today, many business strategies involve planning for a technological advantage.

Obtaining a technological advantage, you can often achieve better sales, improved productivity or even market domination. This can mean investing in research and development, acquiring a smaller company to gain access to their technology or even acquiring employees with unique skills that will give the company a technological advantage.

Business Strategy Toolkit Training Course Description

The business strategy toolkit training course offers a package, or a “toolkit”, of the tools, tactics, methods, and models that you need to build a strong strategic structure for your business.

The business strategy toolkit training course introduces you to the basic principals and techniques of strategic business management. During this training course, we will help you grasp the concept of strategy and how it impacts competitive advantage.

The business strategy toolkit training course will assist you explore various strategic tools and methods to identify environmental threats and opportunities. We also will teach you to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your organization to develop required competencies.

While it is critical for a manager to work in the business (function), it is as crucial for them to spend sufficient time working on the business (strategy). Setting major strategies for an organization would evolve with time and constantly change based on different events, yet defining the baseline, even in a broad and general outline, can make a significant change in the consequence actions of the organization. Plus, executing such strategies are as important as defining them. Through the business strategy toolkit training course, we will teach you to define strategies suitable for your business and then use the tools and resources available to you to execute those strategies.

Trainees will also learn:

• The main challenges outside the organization that could affect the performance of the organization
• How to deal with these challenges?
• What are the key strategies and tactics you need to use to accomplish the best results?
• Emotional intelligence in leadership
• Different dynamic approach by using creative and innovative methods
• Persuasion and influencing skills and tactics to achieve your goals

In order to foresee the future growth areas of your business and the potential issues that might damage your organization, as a manager, you need to plan both efficiently and effectively. In the business strategy toolkit training course, we will provide you a complete foundation in a broad range of strategic exercises and procedures.

Audience

The business strategy toolkit training is a 2-day course suitable for:

• Business owners
• Managers involved in developing strategies for their organization
• Middle managers who are on the track to senior positions
• Both public and private sectors can benefit from this training course

Training Objectives

Upon the completion of the business strategy toolkit training course, the attendees are able to:

• Develop the necessary skills to perform internal and external analysis
• Evaluate the dynamics of competition
• Build strategies by applying suitable structures and tools
• Understand and discuss the basics of strategy implementation and control
• Describe competitive advantage
• Develop research skills to always stay updated and informed about what is related to the business
• Develop greater and broader awareness and competencies
• Develop better skills of monitoring, supporting, and performance
• Establish norms and regulations
• Use the resources in the most effective way
• Take more reasonable risks
• Share knowledge

Course Outline

Overview of Strategy Toolkit

• Background of strategic development
• The importance of strategy tools
• List of strategy tools
• Which tools are used the most

Strategic Thinking

• What is “frames of reference”?
• Various thinking styles and how they impact developing strategies in organizations
• Always look at the big picture, while paying attention to detail
• The role of creativity in strategic thinking

Structure of The Strategic Planning

• Principals of organizational and corporate planning
• Corporate strategy vs. business strategy
• The role of strategic leadership on the planning culture
• Importance of competitive advantage
• Strategies must target the future
• Importance of the ability to prioritizing tasks and actions
• How to write a one-page-strategic-plan
• Why? What? How? Who? When?
• Creating values and managing them

How To Create Unique Value?

• How to set effective strategies in the absence of necessary and valuable resources?
• Importance of mission statements
• Outsource strategies
• Stay away from greed and distrust
• Essential elements to profitability

Principals Of Value Creation and Capture

• Integrate resources
• Set dynamic abilities and sustain advantages
• Clients’ perspectives and expectations
• Who gets the most value from being creative

The Strategy Toolkit

• Core competences analysis
• Critical (key) success factors
• Industry life cycle
• PESTLE
• Porters’ forces
• Portfolio Matrices, BCG or McKinsey
• Resource-Based View
• Scenario Planning
• SWOT
• Value chain
• Strategic Activity Trees (SATs)
• Using the uncertainty and importance grid to priorities key activities
• Cognitive and Causal Mapping
• Fishbone analysis of problems
• Wishbone analysis of potential
• Benchmarking for gap widening
• Introducing force field and stakeholder analysis

Strategy Tool Practice Based On The Company Characteristics

• Size of the company
• The type of industry
• The HQ location

The When, How, And Why Of Strategy Tools

• The value of strategy tools
• Most valuable strategy tools in the various phases of the strategy process
• Observed value across the three phases of the strategy process
• Reasons for using strategy tools
• Most and least dropped strategy tools
• Reasons to drop strategy tools

What Can Affect Using The Strategy Tools

• Training and education
• Career effects

People And Culture Effect

• Main parameters of developing vision, mission, and purpose statement
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• Richard Barrett’s concept
• Stephen Covey’s theory
• Hofstede’s cultural dimentions
• Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI)
• Blanchard and the Situational Leadership Model
• Belbin’s Team Roles

Strategic Frameworks

• Developing the framework, step by step
• Effect of the corporate value on individual values
• The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Model
• The Corporate Alignment Model (CAM)
• Scenario planning
• Storytelling
• McKinsey 7Ss framework
• Kaplan and Norton Strategy Maps
• Peter Senge – The Fifth Discipline

Financial Sector

• The BCG development matrix
• Financial ratios
• Evaluating financial attraction via the “value-over-time” curve
• Budgeting
• Overhead cost analysis
• Discounted Cash-flow (DCF)
• Value Based Management (VBM)

Implementing The Strategy Tools

• Length and style of a strategic plan
• Developing the storyline
• How to communicate the plan
• Evaluate the implementation difficulty
• Implementation plans
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Kaplan and Norton concept of the Balanced Score Card (BSC)

Business Strategy Toolkit