Assignment 2: LASA 1 Assignment—The Leader as a Strategist
Report
Choose a company from this list
1.
2.
3.
4.
5. Price water house Coopers
Deloitte
Albertsons
Koch Industries
Cargill For this assignment, you will choose an organization to analyze. This organization can be one you are
personally familiar with, or one you have observed to be an effective organization, You now become a
newly appointed senior leader in that organization.
As a new leader, you must prepare a report for the CEO that assesses the organization’s overall
alignment between its vision, mission, values, and strategy. This report should consist of the following
sections:
1. An analysis of the strategic cascade of the organization
This includes assessing the organization’s strategy and market position. Use the framework
implied in Michael Porter’s (1997) article “What is Strategy.” When describing the business
strategy of your organization, consider the following questions: What is the target market (target customer)? What is your organization’s value proposition (How does it deliver value that satisfies the
target’s wants and needs?)? How is your product or service positioned in the market (What specific features and
attributes define the product/service and how is its value reflected in its pricing,
distribution, marketing communications, etc.?)? How is your organization sustainably different from your competitors (What is the source
of uniqueness and how sustainable is it from being diminished by competitors?)?
2. A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis
A SWOT analysis is a strategy planning tool that examines both internal and external
environments for factors and trends that should shape planning and operations over the next five
years. Environmental factors internal to the company are classified as strengths (to be leveraged)
or weaknesses (to be mitigated), while external factors are classified as either opportunities (to be
pursued) or threats (to be monitored and responded to).
Some primer questions for the SWOT analysis include the following:
Strengths What advantages does your organization have? What do you do better than anyone else? What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others cannot? What do people in your market see as your strengths? What factors mean that you "get the sale"? What is your organization’s unique selling proposition (USP)? Weaknesses What aspects of your product or service could you improve? What market segments or competitive areas should you avoid? What are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses? What factors can make you lose sales? Opportunities What good opportunities can you spot? What interesting trends are you aware of?
Useful opportunities can come from such things as the following:
o Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale o Changes in government policy related to your field o Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on o Local events Threats What obstacles do you face? What are your competitors doing? Are quality standards or specifications for your job, products, or services changing? Is changing technology threatening your position? Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems? Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?
3. A summary of the internal environment, including the organization’s values and the key elements
of the organization architecture that influence worker behavior.
Include the following characteristics when analyzing the internal environment: Structure: This includes the ways the organization assigns formal roles and
responsibilities, decision-making authority, expertise and skills, and work tasks. Think of
the organization chart and how its implied structure directs the decision making, resource
allocation, and workflow of the organization. Is it consistent with the strategy? Systems: This comprises the information flows that coordinate activities between groups
and across the organization structure while helping direct worker behavior, including
performance management, financial management, operating, forecasting and planning,
and other regulating mechanisms. How do these systems help align workers and their
actions with the strategy? Culture: This consists of the unwritten rules and norms that govern worker behavior and
help coordinate the activities across structural boundaries. Is the organization culture an
enabler or impediment to the corporate strategy? What specific behaviors embedded in
the culture support the strategy? What specific behaviors block the strategy?
4. A synthesis of the information evaluating the ability of the organization to implement the strategy
using Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices (for example, modeling the way) as a framework.
Include answers to the following: Company Culture
o Describe the values and culture of your organization.
o What are the values of your organization? o How are they reflected in the behaviors you see at work? Employee Behaviors
o Describe the behaviors in your organization. o Are these behaviors consistent with the business strategy?
o Where do they conflict with the strategy? o What new behaviors are required to align with the strategy? Leadership
o How might you and other leaders create new behaviors to support the strategy? o What specific actions would you implement to communicate, motivate, model the
way, coach, inspire the vision, challenge the process, and encourage the heart?
Your response to each part of the assignment should be approximately three pages.
