Regional Skills Partnership in a Global Economy Management and Leadership –

1. Regional Skills Partnership in a Global Economy Management and Leadership – building strategy skills Richard Whittington Said Business School 22 June 2005

2. Learning to Strategise • Starting point: • Strategy increasingly makes the difference • But strategies have shorter shelf-lives than ever before • And they are generated at lower and lower • organisational levels • More managers are strategising, more often, • than ever before • So how do managers learn to strategise?

3. How do Managers Learn? The community- of-practice theorists The business school sceptic • not very much formally • requires ‘legitimate participation’ • depends upon social group • involves more than cognitive skills

4. Strategy is something that: • involves group work (board-meetings, presentations, projects, away-days, elevators…) • social acceptance • personal confidence • tacit, practical skills

5. Research Approach: Tracking cohorts of directors attending the IoD ‘Strategic Direction’ courses, before and after, over one-two years. Self and peer assessment of learning Reporting early analysis now Guided by ‘communities-of-practice’ literature (Duguid & Brown), but: - strategising is a highly diffuse practice - strategising draws on more than local practices

6. Complementary Combinations in Strategy Learning • Formal and Informal Learning: • ‘I do sky-diving and sky-diving in the UK is not recommended. • You spend a lot of time waiting for the weather. And that’s when • I do my strategising’ • ‘I’d never really considered strategy as such until I had some formal • training. All the issues facing the business, I’d never recognise • without formal training. Its obvious looking at colleagues – and at • international colleagues – who have had no training, that they don’t • think strategically’ • ‘Reading Johnson and Scholes was an absolute breakthrough’.

7. Complementary Combinations in Strategy Learning • Explicit and Internalised Knowledge • ‘I’m constantly SWOTing things. No matter what it is, you can SWOT it. • I do two or three SWOTS a day’ • ‘Having used them (SWOT, Porter) probably twice in a formal way, I • would say that after that they’re in your head. You don’t write it down, • you sort of see it in your head. It becomes a way of thinking rather • than a tool’

8. Complementary Combinations in Strategy Learning 3. Confidence as Well as Knowledge ‘With the (IoD) course came a confidence to believe that these were the issues, that you were using your time as a director effectively, concentrating on those. Without the course, you could still have been wondering, maybe, is this really what I should be doing?’

9. Complementary Combinations in Strategy Learning 4. Strategy Teachers as Well as Learners: ‘It is very frustrating for me in this environment. The problem is the board. None of them are thinking strategically. Its like carrying around a wardrobe’ ‘I’m constantly drip feeding them. The only way I’m communicating the strategic approach is by continually updating the business plan, throwing it out every other month, getting them to read it and absorb it…. They’re slowly responding to it now.’

10. Final Remarks: Let’s recognise that: • Strategy skills are increasingly fundamental to economic success 2. Complementary approaches to learning work better than dichotomous ones • Learning comes through practice – e.g. projects, • coaching and mentors. 4. Learning needs formal support – e.g. business education 5. Individual learning requires whole-team learning