The Strategic Lenses

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來自 University of London 的課程

Keeping up with Change: Issues for the Finance Professional

252 個評分

University of London

Keeping up with Change: Issues for the Finance Professional

252 個評分

This MOOC identifies and explores a number of challenges to the finance professional arising from the ever changing business environment. Increasingly, financial decisions must take account of strategic consequences. The first module, Exploring Strategic Position, Choice and Action helps in doing that – setting a strategic context for planning for, monitoring and controlling projects and activities. An on-going set of challenges is found in the evolution of International Reporting Standards. The second module focuses on some recent changes in Standards, identifying the drivers for changes, and examining evolution in controversial areas such as leasing and goodwill. The third and final module, Corporate Governance, examines issues which are causing people to re-assess the nature, purpose and scope of corporate governance, and challenges to making governance function effectively. Key issues here are the move to include a broader range of stakeholders, the perennial challenge of agency theory issues, shareholder activism, changing Board structures, and challenges to internal control to better manage risk. This MOOC will be right for you if you are interested in engaging with some of the challenges facing finance professionals, even if you are not one yourself. If you are thinking about returning to study this will provide a taster of academic endeavours through reading articles, critiquing ideas, and blending theory with reality.

從本節課中

Exploring Strategic Position, Choice and Action (Part 1)

Welcome to the first topic of 'Keeping up with Change: Issues for the Finance Professional'. In this module you will be exploring the four key areas of: Strategic Position, Strategic Direction and Choice, Strategic Action and Evaluating Strategic Action. Throughout the module you will have the opportunity to apply all of you learning into context, be that based on your own organisation, or your professional experience in general. This will enabling you to apply the theoretical models we cover in the module to your professional practice.

Exploring Strategic Position, Choice and Action- Introduction to week 12:19

The Strategic Planning Process and its Stages4:06

The Strategic Lenses7:09

Porter's Five Forces8:08

PESTEL/PESTLE Analysis8:03

與講師見面

Dr Sarah Warnes
Teaching Fellow
School of Management, UCL
Dr Alan Parkinson
Deputy Director (Education), School of Management
UCL, University of London
Mr Suman Saha
Visiting Academic
UCL School of Management

[MUSIC]

The strategic lenses were developed by authors Johnson et al 2008.

Now the strategic lenses you could think of these lenses as bifocal glasses or

you could think of these as putting on four different pairs of glasses.

Because essentially, the strategic lenses provide managers

with four different lenses in which to view strategy.

So they help in terms of identifying strategic development, and

they help in terms of identifying different ways to view strategic problems.

So there's four lenses, we have the design lens.

I'll write them all and then we'll go through each one.

The experience lens.

The variety lens, which used to be called the ideas lens and

then finally, the discourse lens.

Managers can adopt any one of these lenses

when they're wanting to approach a strategic problem.

And I think it will be easier to explain it to you if we use an actual,

a real life issue if you like.

So if an organization has realized that the market that

they're operating in has become saturated.

So there's no further growth opportunities in the market that

they're operating in at this point in time.

So if we look at the design lens,

the design lens is a very rational approach to viewing strategy.

It's also logical, it's

about analyzing the environment, collecting data,

reviewing that data in a very logical, rational, practical way.

Shareholders and

stakeholders like the design lens because we're using the language of strategy.

So the external environment, the internal environment, what's going on around us,

but it assumes that organizations are rational beings.

And of course, we know that organizations aren't always rational beings.

They do change.

They do have to be responsive.

Sometimes they're reactive, sometimes they're proactive.

So it's a logical, rational way of assessing the environment and

developing a strategy.

So in our context then,

if we took the design lens approach we would be reviewing possible new markets.

We'd be gathering data on the size of the target market.

We might consider launching into a new country.

We'd gather all the information about that country, the GDP etc, etc.

So we approach things in a very rational, logical way.

The second one is based on the experience and this leans very closely to culture.

And this may be the case in your organizations that when we're

presented with a challenge, we're presented with a problem the immediate

things the managers do is look back over in time, we look back over in history.

Has this problem happened before, what have we done?

And that's informed our strategic position and our strategic choice,

in terms of the actions that we're taking.

We talk about here, culture because this lends,

is very much reliant on the existing culture of the organization.

So if this is an organization that

wants to maintain the status quo is reluctant to change.

Doesn't embrace innovation then they're going to base their choices and

their approach to strategy on something that's already existed.

They're basing it on their experience.

The problem with this and

you may have already guessed, is it does stifle innovation.

It can prevent innovative change.

The experience lens seeks to preserve, if you like the status quo.

If we can carry on as we're doing of we can copy what we did before,

let's take that approach.

So in terms of the saturated market.

They may look back and think okay what actions did we take when we wanted to

launch into the market we're currently in that's now becoming saturated?

The problem is there that may have been 10, 20 years ago and

the environment has completely changed.

So it has its place but

we have to be careful that we're not too much guided by old practices.

Another approach is the variety lens and this really links to innovation and ideas.

Now, if we set the design lens and also the experience lens to a degree,

it's a top down approach in terms of the formulation of strategy.

The choices that we want to make, the approach we want to take.

The variety lens, they argue bubbles up from the organization.

So this is where the employees are encouraged to

come up with innovative ideas.

The organization is more about risk, taking on new challenges,

embracing new concepts.

Challenging the state as go as questioning it.

Organizations that come to mind table would be I would think the likes of

Google, Apple that always coming up with new innovative ideas that bubble up within

the organization rather than coming down and from the top of the organization.

So the variety lens is all about change innovation.

And then we have the discourse lens.

The discourse lens is where managers use language as their resource.

So I've written language there because language,

if you like that shapes the strategy.

And what we're talking about here is managers deciding

on what strategic decision, choice that they wish to make.

And then actually selling that to their work force or selling that to investors.

So it's language is the biggest resource in the discourse strategy.

And it's when the people within the organization they're not really taking

any of these approaches.

It's what they want, their agenda and

then they use language to sell it to the rest of the organization.

Now if we apply this in context in general

Johnson et al would say that managers need to be able to utilize all

four of these lenses and they need to do that smartly.

So depending on the audience, depending on the situation,

they may use a mixture of these lenses,

which is why it's always good to think about the metaphor of bifocal lenses.

Because we can very quickly flick to the different lenses to see what's

gonna be the best approach to solving this strategic challenge.

[MUSIC]

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