Week 9 - Strategy at Ericsson and professional Strategists

Question 1

The rise of openness

Answer 1

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Question 2

Open strategy

Answer 2

• …involves top management and other organizational levels…as well as stakeholders from outside the organisation…draw upon sets of both traditional strategizing practices as well as open practices….and often enabled by IT… (Tavakoli et al., 2017)

Question 3

Forces triggering openness

Answer 3

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Question 4

Open strategy

Answer 4

• Advocates openness in strategy formulation beyond the narrow corporate elite
  Benefits:
  1) organizational reflexivity
  2) quality of decision-making 
increased
  3) shared understanding of strategy
  4) strategic commitment
  5) positive effect on strategy 
implementation

Question 5

Characteristics of open strategy

Answer 5

Transparency – the degree of access to information about strategic decisions available; understanding of roles in strategic process, i.e. visibility of the actors involved and traceability of idea exchanges in strategy formulation activities
Inclusivity - the variety and extend to which actors involved into decision-making and/or strategizing processes, i.e. the range of people that participate

Question 6

Dynamics of open strategy

Answer 6

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Question 7

Examples of open strategising

Answer 7

• HSBC àgiving employees new ways to voice concerns and open up to senior management. Around 10 people called for meeting to talk with management. There is no agenda and employees talk about anything they want. The manager just listens.

Question 8

Open strategy Dilemmas

Answer 8

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Question 9

CS often empowered by IT

Answer 9

• Crowdsourcing: self-selected members of the crowd within a limited time period individually engage in a rigorous problem-solving exercise characterized by well-defined evaluation and selection criteria
• Online communities: aggregating a large number of diverse contributions into a value-creating whole where involved actors with a degree of common identity share their knowledge or perceptions in order to identify issues, or create a shared understanding

Question 10

CS often empowered by IT

Answer 10

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Question 11

Open strategy issues

Answer 11

• Following aspects have to be taken in consideration when creating an open strategy initiatives:
  1) Control: loss of control, unpredictable solutions, unclear responsibility, inclusion of external contributors
  2) Diversity versus expertise: which people to involve, balance of diversity and expertise
  3) Engagement: engagement and motivation of people over time
  4) Policing: reputation, unwanted behaviour

Question 12

Strategists

Answer 12

• Internal strategists – usually freed from operational responsibilities and fully concerned with the future of organization 

• External strategy consultants – specialists independent of the company and contracted to perform a strategy related tasks 

• Internal strategy consultants – in-house strategy consultants working on specific projects