Day 3 : Strategy, Organization, and Leadership

Your strategy for the next decade is vastly different from the last.  Many of your future projects are of unprecedented scope and complexity.   Why do so many efforts to change organizations to align them with a new strategy fail to deliver on expectations?  How can your company develop the organizational and leadership capabilities needed to meet your changing strategic goals?

Strategy, Organization, and Leadership is difficult, and changing:

Developing a strategy for the complex global environment in which corporations operate and compete today is not easy.  However, it is even more difficult to develop the organizational and leadership capabilities needed to deliver on the corporate and business strategies that companies are embracing.  Executives face formidable challenges building organizations that can effectively carry out the strategies of their companies and that can adjust flexibly as the strategies change.  As corporations pursue more complex and demanding strategies, differentiated by business and geography, they find themselves dealing with increasingly complex networks of local and global suppliers and customers, and an increasingly diverse workforce.  They are pursuing greater flexibility in their organization and searching for organizational structures and processes that match their strategies more effectively. 

Around the world, but especially in the Middle East today, more and more important corporate activities are organized in increasingly large, complex projects that exhibit many of the same patterns that we see in the corporation as a whole: complex internal and external networks, a diverse and often geographically distributed workforce, and the challenge of balancing multiple strategic goals.

Building, improving, and leading organizations and major multi-billion dollar projects are capabilities that can be enhanced by a deeper understanding of organizations, of the processes of organizational change, and of the tools and techniques for taking effective organizational action.  An important set of techniques is the “three lenses” approach, which sees the organization as simultaneously a strategic design to achieve specific goals, a political system of interests and influence, and a cultural system of meaning, values, and identity.  The three lenses provide both an improved way of “seeing” organizational processes and a set of tools and strategies for leading and changing them.

Day #3 will focus on a set of hands on, interactive exercises and mini-cases (including Procter and Gamble, Eastman Kodak, and the Japanese general contractors) to develop and deepen the participants’ repertoire for taking more effective action in complex organizations.  The day will focus on developing the following capabilities:

1.      Understanding and using the elements and best practices of strategic organization design:

• How to cluster activities and tasks into the “boxes” of the organization chart (“strategic grouping”)
• How to enable the subunits created in strategic grouping to work together most effectively (“strategic linking”)
• How to assess and provide the resources and motivation for people to carry out the tasks assigned to them in grouping and linking (“alignment”)

2.      Recognizing and working with organizational interests and influence networks:

• How to become more effective at mobilizing the resources and commitment needed to “get the job done”
• How to build a more effective personal network in your organization and business context
• How to recognize important “holes” in the organization and bridge them effectively

3.      Working more effectively with different levels of culture (national, industry, organizational, functional):

• How to diagnose and work with culture and subcultures in different organizational settings
• Understanding why culture is so hard to change, and what leaders can do about it

4.      Integrating the three perspectives to build more effective organizations and to be more effective at taking       action in complex strategic and organizational contexts:

• Developing improved organizational capabilities through reducing the tensions across the design, political, and cultural elements of organization
• Using the “Three Lenses” on organizations as a powerful sense-making and leadership tool
  
  

By the end of Day #3, you will have learned how to be more effective at managing the challenges of the next decade.