Strategic Management

A strategic choice is a moment; strategic management is the system that keeps it alive. This module places strategic management alongside strategic thinking, leadership and governance, introduces Wheelen and Hunger's four stage cycle of scanning, formulating, implementing and evaluating, and shows how the cycle stalls. It then sets out the corporate, business and functional levels of strategy and the discipline of naming the level first.

Most mission, vision and values statements are generic enough that nobody could disagree with them, which means they guide nobody. Drawing on Rumelt's warning against fluff and his idea of a guiding policy, this module offers the interchangeability test for missions, uses Patagonia as a mission that rules things out, and sets practical standards for visions you can check and values that survive a hard, costly decision.

Scanning once a year produces a photograph, when strategy needs a film. This module gives the scanning stage a practical toolkit: PESTLE's six lenses, the questions to ask of each, and how to give each lens an owner so it becomes a habit. It then shows why SWOT is useful for summarising but not sufficient as analysis, using Blockbuster in hindsight to show the cost of shallow scanning beneath a correct list.

Before asking how to compete, an organisation has to ask what it should be in at all. This module uses Ansoff's growth matrix to make growth direction and risk explicit, translates the four quadrants into council and health settings, and then separates direction from route by comparing build, buy and partner. Amazon Web Services shows diversification built from a capability already inside the organisation.

A council does not run one strategy; it runs a portfolio of very different ones competing for the same money, time and political attention. This module introduces the BCG growth-share matrix and the nine-box GE-McKinsey matrix, translates both into public service terms, and shows how to score honestly, avoid common misuses and have the hard conversations. GE's own use of its matrix shows honest exit as a strategic act.

A strategy that never reaches a team's working objectives was never really cascaded. This module separates designing a cascade from reporting on it, offers three tests of a working cascade, and uses two tools as design aids: Objectives and Key Results, from Grove at Intel and Doerr at Google, and Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard, with its four perspectives translated for public service.

Strategic control is about closing the loop, not catching people out. Drawing on Robert Simons' work on control systems, this module distinguishes post-action control, which checks targets after the fact, from steering control, which tests whether the assumptions behind a strategy still hold. Nokia shows how accurate numbers can sit on failing beliefs, and three practical habits show how to build steering control in.

This capstone brings no new theory. It tests the whole strategic management cycle against three documented cases: Microsoft under Satya Nadella, where a corporate pivot, portfolio shift and cascade worked together; a council's 2023 Section 114 notice, where problems were measured and reported but never escalated; and Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan, where a mission shaped the portfolio and survived a costly test.