A guest lecture on Making Strategy which took place at Strathclyde UAE’s Abu Dhabi centre attracted students, alumni and community members on November 28.
The session, "Innovating with the Application of 'Making Strategy': Examples from Practice" was designed and delivered by SBS lecturer and course coordinator Dr Dave Mackay, who in recent years has won 'Best Overall Teacher' and been shortlisted for 'Most Innovative Teacher' in the University of Strathclyde Teaching Excellence Awards, as well as Mr Sandy Wilson of Strathclyde Business School’s Centre for Corporate Connections and Executive Education.
The session with 35 participants complemented and expanded upon the methodologies taught during the Strathclyde MBA 'Making Strategy' course and used real-life examples to show how a bit of application innovation allows techniques from that class to be adapted to create successful strategies in ways that suit a wide range of organisational structures, situations, and challenges.
The examples presented included applications of the 'Making Strategy' techniques by Strathclyde faculty and the Centre for Corporate Connections and Executive Education team via workshops and consulting assignments with three clients: a complex operational site of a multinational company; a small but rapidly growing charity; and a large, well-established public sector organisation. While in each case the format similarly involved the alignment of issues, goals, resources and competencies to create strategies in a systematic and inclusive manner that affords a high degree of employee ownership, anecdotes from each implementation proved that there is indeed room for creativity along methods of input (such as video recording analysis), output (for example, artistic representation of results), and throughout the entire process.
The examples demonstrated that depending on the nature of the organisational circumstances, practitioner preferences and the particular 'strategic' need to be addressed, there is significant scope to innovate with the application of the 'Making Strategy' methods. Furthermore, the session showed that these methods are both flexible and functional, and that with a little creativity and customisation, strategy can be made cohesively across hierarchical and functional levels in countless types of organisations.