إدارة معاصرة - الفصل 8: المدير كمنظم واستراتيجي

Contemporary Management - Chapter 8: The Manager as a Planner and Strategist

• The chapter focuses on the role of managers as planners and strategists in organizations.
• Learning objectives include identifying planning steps, describing managerial planning techniques, differentiating business-level and corporate-level strategies, and describing managerial roles in strategy implementation.

Planning and Strategy

• Planning: Involves identifying and selecting appropriate organizational goals and action courses.
• Strategy: A cluster of decisions regarding goals, actions, and resource allocation for achieving those goals. The organizational plan emerging from the planning process details the specific strategies managers implement to achieve those goals.

Mission Statement

• A broad declaration of an organization's purpose, defining its products, customers, and differentiating it from competitors.
• Examples include Facebook's mission to "build community and bring the world closer together," Twitter's mission to enable "everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly," and Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Three Steps in Planning

• Determining the organization's mission and goals: Defining the business, establishing major goals, and identifying customer needs.
• Formulating strategy: Analyzing the current situation and developing strategies for the future.
• Implementing strategy: Allocating resources and responsibilities for achieving the formulated strategies.

Nature of the Planning Process

• Managers establish and discover the current organizational state.
• They determine the desired future state.
• They decide how to move towards that future state.

Why Planning Is Important

• Gives the organization direction and a sense of purpose.
• Encourages manager participation in decision-making regarding goals and strategies.
• Promotes coordination among different organizational functions.
• Serves as a control mechanism for managers.
• Planning fosters unity, continuity, accuracy, and flexibility.

Types of Plans

• Standing plans: Policies, rules, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) used in programmed decision-making situations.
• Single-use plans: Developed for unique situations, including programs and projects.

Scenario Planning (Contingency Planning)

• Involves creating multiple forecasts of future conditions and analyzing how to respond to them effectively.

Levels and Types of Planning

• Corporate-level plan: Top management decisions defining organizational mission, strategy, and structure.
• Corporate-level strategy: Plan specifying organizational competitions or industry involvement.
• Business-level plan: Divisions' long-term goals for fulfilling corporate goals.
• Business-level strategy: Specific methods a division/unit employs to compete against rivals (e.g., low-cost strategy, differentiation strategy, focused low-cost, and focused differentiation strategies).
• Functional-level plan: Goals that managers of each function pursue to align with business-level goals.
• Examples include functional-level strategies like increasing production by 20%.

Time Horizons of Plans

• Long-term plans: Cover five years or more.
• Intermediate-term plans: Cover one to five years.
• Short-term plans: Cover less than one year.

Formulating Strategy - SWOT Analysis

• A planning exercise where managers identify internal organizational strengths and weaknesses, along with external environmental opportunities and threats.

Levels of Planning and Strategies at General Mills

• Illustrates the interconnectedness of corporate, business, and functional strategies within a large organization.

Formulating Business-Level Strategies

• Low-cost strategy: Driving organizational costs below those of competitors.
• Differentiation strategy: Distinguishing organizational products through features like design, quality, or post-sale service.
• Focused low-cost strategy: Targeting a specific market segment, striving to achieve the lowest cost within that segment.
• Focused differentiation strategy: Concentrating on a specific segment and striving to offer the most differentiated products.

Formulating Corporate-Level Strategies

• Concentration on a single industry: Reinvesting profits to strengthen the organization's position within its existing industry.
• Vertical integration: Expanding operations either backward (into a company that provides raw inputs) or forward (into an industry using or selling the product).
• Diversification: Expanding into new industries to create new value goods/services. Related diversification enters industries linked to existing businesses for competitive advantage; unrelated diversification enters completely different industries for product expansion and portfolio strategy (potentially with too much diversification).

International Expansion

• Global strategy: Minimal customization for different markets. This may lead to lower production costs and disregard for local competitors' advantages.
• Multidomestic strategy: Adapting products and marketing specifically to each country's needs and demands (but it raises production cost).

Choosing a Way to Expand Internationally

• Analysis of country-specific forces is crucial for selecting the right international expansion approach. This includes exporting/importing, licensing, franchising, strategic alliances, and wholly owned foreign subsidiaries.

Planning and Implementing Strategy

• Specific steps in implementing strategies, including responsibility allocation, action plan development, timetabling with precise measurable goals, resource allocation, and holding individuals accountable for corporate, divisional, and functional goals.