Chief Strategy Officer – Creating Your Strategy Using the Strategy Choice Cascade

Good Strategy is about how an organization will move forward and figuring out how to advance the organization’s interest.
Good leaders must be willing and able to say “NO!” to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is as much about what an organization does as what it doesn’t do.
A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies and resources so as to accomplish important objectives and exploit windows of opportunity. These objectives are defined by your Strategic Business Objectives (SBOs).
Strategy brings relative strength to bear against relative weakness. The most basic idea of strategy is the application of your organizational strength’s (unfair advantages) applied to the most promising opportunity.
Strategy creates organizational advantage and new strength through:
Coordinating policies and actions. This creates strength through the coherence of its design. This means that the organization pursues multiple objectives that are connected with one another.
Eliminating unconnected objectives or objectives which are in conflict with one another. These unconnected objectives and conflicted objectives will undermine any strategic intent.
The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts it creates in viewpoint.
This shift in perspective helps to identify new patterns of advantages and weaknesses.
Good strategy has an essential logical structure:
Identifies the challenge(s) using diagnostic tools.
Defines a guiding policy to address the core issues of the challenge called out in the diagnosis.
Performs a set of coherent actions that address the challenge head on. Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy
In this week’s assignment you are the Chief Strategy Officer of your current enterprise (Accenture). This company will be the foundation for future assignments.
Your Mission: Develop a winning strategy for your organization using the Strategy Choice Cascade. Show how each choice was made and how they support each other.
Details matter. The strategy you develop here will be used to support later developments in this class including your set of Strategic Business Objectives(SBOs). Therefore it is very important for you to think this process through and demonstrate a solid understanding of what your strategy is and the thinking that created it. Provide an overview of how you applied the strategy cascade and the supporting details of how each component was determined. Conclude with a summary of why you believe that this is a winning strategy for your organization.
Be sure to Include:
1.What are your goals and winning aspirations?
What will you become in the future?
2. How will you win?
3. What capabilities must you have to win?
4. What management systems are needed?
5. Where will we play?
The only productive, intelligent way to generate possibilities for strategy choice is to consider matched pairs of Where to Play and How to Win choices. Generate a variety of pairs and then ask about each:
Can it be linked to an inspiring, attractive Winning Aspiration?
Do we currently have, or can we reasonably build, the capabilities that would be necessary to win where we would play?
Can we create the Management Systems that would need to be in place to support the building and maintenance of the necessary capabilities?
Helpful links – Using the Strategy Choice Cascade to Win