Once again there's three main elements to a successful Strategy Execution: Analysis, Formulation, Implementation. So let's talk a little more about Analysis. In the past, we define strategic analysis as follows, the assessment of an organization's current competitive position and the identification of future valuable competitive positions and how the firm plans to achieve them. So some thoughts on this. First of all, strategic analysis is done from a generalist's perspective. It's a generalist's perspective in terms of different functional elements within the organization, finance, marketing and accounting. And it's also a generalist's from the sense of being integrated. Integrating across different concepts and tools and frameworks that we bring to bare when analyzing the organization. Ultimately, we wonder where in strategic reasoning to our analysis, we want to think about dynamics, complexity, and most importantly competition. How that impacts our strategy moving forward. We want to ground this in analytics and data and we're going to talk more in later modules about strategy research and strategy analytics. And then last but not least, we recognize that a good strategic analysis integrates various tools and frameworks that are in our strategist toolkit. Now, who exactly does this strategic analysis? Well, the most obvious are those who run organizations. These are people who formulate and implement strategy. The CEO or President of an organization. An entrepreneur or small business owner. In some larger organizations, they might have a specified role for strategy, like a VP for strategic planning or a chief strategy officer. Last but not least, once again in larger organizations there might be individual business units or general managers who have strategy as a core part of their role. However, they are not the only roles that do strategic analysis. And it's important to recognize that there are people who simply evaluate strategy, investors for example, financial analysts, who are going to look in an organization and try to asses a strategy to maybe make projections about its future financial performance. There are also a whole industry of those who make recommendations about future strategic actions like consultants. Finally, there are what me might call Secondary Stakeholders, activist, governments, other players in the broader ecosystem. Who might have recommendations and opinions about what the strategic direction of a firm maybe. Finally, how do we go about doing a strategic analysis? What we have here is a really simple four step way to do a comprehensive strategic analysis. First, identify the mission and values of the firm. This is critical for understanding what the firm values and how it may influence where opportunities they look for and what actions they might be willing to take. Second, Analyze the Competitive Environment. We need to look externally, looking at what opportunities the environment provides, how are competitors likely to react. Third, Analyze Competitive Positions. Think about what your own capabilities are and how they might relate to the opportunities that are available. The last but not least, Analyze and Recommend Strategic Actions and this is where the rubber really hits the road. This is where we ultimately want to get to, actions for future improvement, and ultimately we want to think about this idea of, how do we create more value. Given our current competitive position, how can we take actions that are going to create more value for our various stakeholders? You might recall the Strategist's Challenge, which we have referred to in previous modules. It's very simply this idea, the good strategies emerge out of the values, opportunities and capabilities of the organizations. It's this three coming together, identifies Valuable Competitive Positions for the future.
