Strategic Planning & Management

Introduction:

This seminar is designed to provide leaders and professionals with a set of transformational tools and techniques to help them maximize their own and their team’s creative potential in a strategic context. Its starting-point is self-discovery: participants will work on the inside first and then focus outwards to impact on the world of business.

The focus of the first week of this course will be on thinking in different ways. Participants should be prepared to move out of their comfort zone and experiment with new ways of creating and communicating an inspiring leadership vision.

The second week helps demystify the frequently-misunderstood concept of ‘strategy’. Whilst focusing on the analytical disciplines on which a successful strategy is based, it centers on strategic planning as a value-adding process that harnesses the leader’s and the team’s ability to combine analysis with creative thinking and enables ideas and plans to be nurtured through to reality.

Targeted Groups:

• Top and Mid-level managers
• Supervisors & Team leaders 
• Strategic planning department
• Project managers
• Human recourses department
• Employees who want to gain critical skills to improve their career

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course the participants will be able to:

• Understand the linkage between operational and strategic management
• Demonstrate innovative methods for harnessing others’ creative potential
• Align their responsibilities and objectives with the strategy of their organization
• Communicate their vision in refreshing and engaging ways
• Define the concepts of ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic plans’
• Understand and explain visionary thinking as part of the strategic process and apply strategic planning to their management issues
• Place their part of the organization within the overall context of corporate strategy
• Gain confidence in managing their contribution to strategic implementation
• Increase career flexibility (vertically and horizontally)
• Accelerate thinking speed and problem resolution for dilemmas
• Improve understanding of the impact of operational specialization on corporate strategy
• Improve team working capabilities in analyzing and solving strategic problems creatively
• Improve skills in ensuring the most effective impact of individual specializations

Targeted Competencies:

• Leadership & management skills
• Strategic thinking
• Strategic planning
• Problem-solving
• Communication skills

Course Content: 

Unit 1: Creative Problem-Solving:

• Leadership reality assessment
• Leadership VS Management
• Understanding our brain function
• Myths of creativity
• The limitations of the rational
• Divergent approaches to problem-solving
• Letting go of logic
• Analogous thinking modes
• Convergent and divergent modes

Unit 2: Developing the Vision Creatively:

• Six thinking hats
• Using differing thinking styles
• JOHARI window
• The business plan process & creating a vision
• Harnessing the power of the team
• Organizational culture and its influence on innovation
• Letting go of the ego
• Working with different creative preferences

Unit 3: Strategic Thinking and Business Analysis:

• What are strategy and strategic planning?
• Why are strategy and strategic planning important?
• What are the main conceptual frameworks?
• External analysis - understanding and analyzing business attractiveness - macro-environmental factors, growth drivers, competitive forces, market dynamics
• Benchmarking your own strategic position/competitor analysis
• Analyzing customers
• “Thinking backward from the customer”
• Mini-case on importance of external analysis

Unit 4: Strategic Plans and the Relevance of Alliances and Joint Ventures:

• Review of the tools used so far
• The content of a strategy: avoiding “paralysis by analysis”
• Putting a strategic plan together – the 5-page framework
• A real-life example of a business strategy/strategic plan
• Strategies for alliances and joint ventures
• Example of best practice in alliances and joint ventures

Unit 5: Global Strategy, Teambuilding, and the Management of Internal Communication:

• The essence of globalization and global strategy
• Globalization – the strategic dimension
• Globalization – the organizational dimension
• Globalization – the human dimension
• How to build and manage a strategic planning team
• Communicating strategy through the organization
• Gaining your team’s commitment and buy-in to the strategy