Prof. John McGee (Dean & Fellow in Corporate Strategy at Templeton College, Oxford University), Chairman of A.T.M Management Consulting eloquently describes the reasons why your organisation should have a Strategy to tackle the 21st century challenges head-on.
Why, because Strategy offers a competitive advantage that is not achievable by operational efficiency and effectiveness alone. "While operational efficiency leads to cost advantage that is easily copied and imitated by the competition," explains Prof. Michael Porter, "Strategy is about a firm's policies and tactics becoming deliberately different than the competition to allow the firm to seek and secure your competitive advantage." As Prof. Gary Hamel puts it in his book 'Competing for the Future', operational efficiency is concerned with how the company competes today, whereas strategy is concerned with how the company will compete in tomorrow's competitive market.
Trawling through the evidence on successes & failures of strategy development & implementation over the past 60-years, at A.T.M, we have found a pretty patchy record of success. We observed that while each decade had a different strategic management themes to address the prominent challenges of the time, the basic problems and issues which led to the demise or failure of each theme or model were very similar to what most organisations encounter today.
That is why A.T.M's strategy development & implementation approach very thoughtfully avoids management fads and the latest strategy bandwagon in favour of our unique 3-stage strategy development proposition. Designed to address the 21st Century challenges head-on, our approach is the antithesis of the wellmeaning but pointless strategy statements that so often collect dust in HQ filing cabinets while the rest of the organisation carries on regardless or even oblivious to their existence. Instead, we put people at the heart of the strategy development process, ensuring corporate-wide engagement with the strategy and an understanding that it matters that it is followed through at every level. Above all, our approach is an integrated one – ensuring that an organisation has all the necessary strategic skills, capabilities & core competencies needed to develop, execute, implement, maintain, and renew the corporate & business strategy that we develop & implement.