Strategy concepts and frameworks

¶ … leadership communication to strategy, or the role of "execution" to strategy or the role of "participation" in strategy) from our text and course embedded in the above. Feel free to structure them in any order that suits you for clarity and coherence of discussion. You choose which concepts (there are many) to present and how to present them.

In the excerpt of the book Tough Choices by Carly Fiorina the fundamentals of leadership, training and communications programs, and setting the foundation for employees to take ownership of vertical market and process objectives are defined. Integrating all of these concepts together are balanced scorecards of metrics reported to the management level. Taken together all of these strategies are aimed at pushing ownership of organizational change to the lowest levels possible in HP so that lasting change can be achieved.

Beginning with the fundamentals of leadership, Ms. Fiorina stresses the need for having transparency and authenticity to the process and strategy level. A reliance on transparency and authenticity is one of the more powerful catalysts of trust being created in organizations by leaders (Eriksen, 2009). This is also critical for leadership to motivate and gain the commitment of employees for change as well (Crainer, Dearlove, 2008). By having the entire series of metrics available and visible for the company, Ms. Fiorina is attempting to change the culture of HP from being closed to open, accountable and completely transparent about each division's performance. This is also critically important for setting the foundation for future learning by employees by providing a sense of purpose of how each person's contribution matters to the entire group. Called self-efficacy (self-learning) or autonomy, this is one of the three most critical elements an organization has to have for its employees to internalize the goals of their jobs (Eriksen, 2009). Leadership needs to not only create accountability, authenticity, and transparency to create trust, but it also must create opportunities of autonomy, mastery and purpose as well (Eriksen, 2009). Finally leaders must also have a vested interest in the outcomes they are striving for; there must be shared ownership of the outcome. Using measures of performance openly as Ms. Fiorina advocates, this is achieved as executives will be judged continually by the company by the scorecards shown.

The fact that HP chooses to only communicate metrics throughout its organization also sets an expectation that results that are quantified only matter. Yet the communications strategy of management doesn't stop at that point, there is the effort to show at every metric or key performance indicator (KPI) how performance is interlinked to strategy and objectives. This integration of metrics with strategy across financial performance, operational efficiency and internally-focused employee programs all anchors the leadership communications strategy in quantifiable terms that can also be easily communicated. Implicit in this strategy is the concept of seeking collective growth and improvement over time, as the organization bands together to increase the impact on metrics (Kim, Hatcher, 2009). This also will over time change the HP culture to one where ambiguity and lack of clarity of goals will eventually change to be more finely-tuned and focused on key performance indicators (KPI) and metrics that matter. The use of scorecards to bring ownership to each employee is also prevalent in the quote from Ms. Fiorina's book. Keeping with the need of leadership to create autonomy, mastery and purpose throughout an organization, scorecards also can assist employees in gaining autonomy over their roles as well. It is implicit in the quote that Ms. Fiorina is attempting to infuse this concept of owning performance by owning metrics over time. Mastery of a task also include the flexibility and freedom of defining how one's performance will be measured, with which metrics, over how long, and what a reasonable level of performance is (Chavan, 2009). This is essential for leadership to get commitment from workers to accomplish the goals over time. HP's efforts to infuse mastery into the roles of their employees are based on their use of the scorecards that are pervasive throughout their organizations. With the goal of creating autonomy, mastery and purpose throughout the organization, measured performance through scorecards sets an accurate and clearly communicated set of expectations to employees (Kim, Hatcher, 2009).

All of these programs taken together are meant to give HP more focus and flexibility in responding to internal needs and capitalizing on opportunities while alleviating threats externally. The scorecards and their measurements are being used as a strategy for creating transformational leadership throughout the company. The essence of transformational leadership is in creating an organizational culture where employees can align their greatest strengths to the greatest needs of the company (Whitford, Moss, 2009). HP is attempting to do this by using approaches to communication that underscore individual contribution and aim to create greater autonomy, mastery and purpose.

2) In a recent article about strategy, the following advice was offered by George Stalk, Jr. suggesting the use of strategy moves to confuse the competition for the purposes of getting the competition to "Do something dumb that they otherwise wouldn't have…" or to "Not do something smart that they otherwise would have…"

Specific examples included: (a) employing unfamiliar techniques, such as in sales or marketing, that traditionally were not used in this particular industry, (b) hiding the real source of your success via unlikely means such as using service forces to act as sales forces, and (c) allowing rivals to misinterpret your success because they act on a plausible and conventional, but purposely incomplete, set of assumptions about the real root cause of your success; for example squeezing costs rather than aggressively using assets.

(A) Discuss (a), (b), and (c) in terms of their being either offensive or defensive moves. Are these moves offensive, or defensive, or both? Explain and offer examples. What are some of the advantages and challenges of this approach?

(B) Do you see the opportunity to use any of Generic Strategies here, or are the generics being "cloaked" here to achieve this "masked intent" around an operational strategy? What impact does this have on strategy communication and execution?

Each of the strategies mentioned, using unfamiliar techniques in sales and marketing, hiding the real source of your success by selling through services organizations rather than sales, and allowing rivals to misinterpret success all can be both offensive and defensive depending on their context and use. The most prevalent of these strategies, selling through a service force instead of a sales force, has become increasingly commonplace as manufacturers are reverting back to their customer bases for significant revenue streams. Examples of this include Otis Elevator, a subsidiary of Untied Technologies, relying on elevator and escalator service teams to upsell customers to more services and increased warranty sales. This strategy of using service organizations to protect a customer base and expand the revenue streams it produces are common in manufacturing and highly differentiated services industries (Shi, Shi, Chan, Wang, 2009). For services industries including telecommunications providers that rely on low customer churn for profitability, this is critical. As services departments are often more trusted than the initial sales teams (Shi, Shi, Chan, Wang, 2009) there is the corresponding need for creating a high degree of innovation at the process and product level as well (Shelton, 2009). Creating innovation in services and products will also transform this strategy from one that is defensive to one that can capture incremental market share over time. At the core of this strategy is the ability of services teams to be trusted advisors (Shi, Shi, Chan, Wang, 2009) to customers and assist them in solving their problems more efficiently than would otherwise be the case. Studies indicate that on this issue of trust, services teams who are empathetic and focus on the customers' problems, quickly and thoroughly solving them, are trusted significantly more often than sales teams ever are (Shelton, 2009). Throughout all of these strategies the issue of trust is one that needs to be continually evaluated from the perspective of the customer as well.

The use of unfamiliar techniques in sales and marketing including guerilla marketing, the growing use of social networking, and the use of customer testimonials in video on YouTube. These are unfamiliar techniques in industries that are slow to adopt new practices over time yet highly effective from both a defensive and offensive strategy standpoint. The use of guerilla marketing can be effective specifically as a defensive strategy when used to gain market share against a larger, more entrenched competitor. Consider how Apple has been able to challenge the entire PC industry and emerge as the strongest company financially in the industry today as a result of this focus on being the "outsider" brand. Apple was very successful with this second strategy to create a brand for those that see themselves as nonconformist and highly creative, not wanting to be locked into the boundaries of traditional PCs and software. This strategy, over the last two decades, has given Apple one of the most loyal customer bases in the PC industry (Hein, 2009). What had begun as a defensive strategy has quickly transformed to one that is offensive and aimed at gaining new customers. The recent series of Apple commercials on television in the U.S. make this point clear as Windows PC users switch to Apple since they would have to upgrade to Windows 7 anyway. It is humorous and an example of how Apple is now making its nonconformist position now the center of its strategy to go against Microsoft Windows 7.