TOPICS: Corporate & Business Strategy | Competitive Strategies  | Corporate Development

We help you to design or formulate your strategy during a strategic boot-camp or workshop using several tools and methodologies :

• Strategy planning
• Scenario building
• Understanding emerging strategies VS planned strategies
• Business model generation
• Strategy modelling & simulation
• Understand and define generic strategies
• Understand and define value-driven strategies
• Understand and use Blue Ocean strategy

At SEED Advisory we look at formulation in an unconventional way that takes different perspectives on how one should establish a road map for success. For example, in a study of strategic planning systems, we noted the following stages in the cycle for a large corporation:

• Initial guidelines: the cycle’s starting point is usually a set of guidelines or assumptions about the external environment - for example, price levels and supply and demand conditions - and the overall priorities, guidelines and expectations of the corporate centre.
• Business-level planning: business units or divisions then draw up strategic plans to present to the corporate centre. Corporate centre executives then discuss those plans with the business managers usually in face-to-face meetings. On the basis of these discussions the businesses revise their plans for further discussion.
• Corporate-level planning: the corporate plan results from the aggregation of the business plans. This coordination may be undertaken by a corporate planning department that, in effect, has a coordination role. The corporate board then has to approve the corporate plan.
• Financial and strategic targets are then likely to be extracted to provide a basis for performance monitoring of businesses and key strategic priorities on the basis of the plan.

The strategy design, or strategy formulation is an evolving concept. Strategy as "design" takes the view that strategy development can be a logical process in which the forces and constraints on the organisation are weighed carefully through analytic and evaluative techniques to establish clear strategic direction.

The strategy design concept however has known limits. The future success of an organization is not only determined by the strategic course of action intended by the leadership team. A very large share of the strategic performance of the firm will be emerging from external and internal factors.

The theories on strategy have largely evolved since Michael Porter and classic strategy tools do not fulfill today's leadership need: traditional ideas about strategy, such as Michael Porter’s model of industry, tacitly make three major assumptions: first, an industry comprises unrelated buyers, sellers, competitors, and vendors of substitutes, all interacting at arm’s length; second, value stems mostly from structural advantage; and third, uncertainty is low enough so that executives can predict the competition’s behavior and choose their own strategy to suit. 

Even if any one of these was correct, it’s not likely that all three would be. In fact, they do not really represents the conditions of a modern economy, in which strategists must take into account a wider range of industry structures and bases of competitive advantage, to say nothing of a higher degree of uncertainty. In this context, we approach strategy as well as a Design, an Experience, a set of Ideas or a Discourse. The choice for an approach is based upon the particular company position within its life-cycle and environment.