Strategic Management - A Reflection

My objective at the end of my MBA is to emerge a better strategic thinker. Someone who can listen, can think, and flesh out, the core from any given macroeconomic phenomenon, business, project, team and eventually personal, situations. I hope to go about this goal using more diversified cross functional knowledge, experience, study and observation of people and situations.

The course opened my mind to include a multitude of possibilities and to apply certain basic frameworks, methods, processes, and ultimately common sense to analyzing and churning out thoughts on a variety of issues.

I must admit at the very beginning that I am no master to coming up with solutions, more a practitioner in thinking about the core, the heart of business issue. Coming up with solutions in my opinion would require a more patient, sustained and dedicated study of a variety of businesses. At this juncture, I am neither qualified, nor do I possess the knowledge to make me a strategic solution maker of repute and acumen, but I certainly am pushing to get there.

Pardon my digression, returning to the course, I would say prior to SM, my instinct was almost always to think about the solution to any given problem first. Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink talks about instinct, and I used to apply similar principles to problems. What I realized later is that most of my thinking is done to rationalize the first instinct I get and what I perceive as right.

This was my strongest notion that got challenged, and eventually changed with Strategic Management.

I can break my learning with Strategic Management into three broad stages: Understanding, Learning and Internalizing phases.

Understanding Phase

I began to realize that the way I was thinking could be improved by listening. In term 1, my focus was strictly on understanding a method of thinking. My whole life till beginning of SM1, I have been a free thinker, where I used to listen to multiple sources, but ultimately discover my chosen path. With SM, I was forcing myself to step into the shoes of my professor, my classmates, and my learning team.

This was a moment where I grappled with the instinct to throw out a solution that I felt was the best and only possible solution to the problem, and was consciously trying to listen, think, and most importantly analyze the situation around which a particular business problem lay.

This was particularly helpful to me to understand the readings and cases we were discussing in class. The external analysis requires the strategic thinker to appreciate the environment, and I had embarked on that path. This was, however, not clear to me at the beginning, and like most things in my life, made a lot of sense when I looked back.

Learning Phase

I began to practice this habit with other subjects, and more importantly begin to narrow down my view to a particular business under discussion. This was rewarding in a lot of ways, because I began to see why taking the decision was important to the proponents of the case.

I was delighted to implement certain techniques I had observed during my understanding phase on my learning team and my peer group.

For example, one of the key realizations that I experienced during the beginning of the course was that time was, in fact, the most precious resource to not just MBA students, but for everyone. Hence, the objective of mine was to use time as efficiently as possible, and I applied that to my learning team. By nature I am not a dictator kind of a leader. I prefer to lead people to think they are moving themselves, and no one is brandishing a whip behind them. I admit, to do this, I have to play the good-cop/ bad-cop, and in certain cases be very passive aggressive, and tactical, but I have learnt that these are essential practices that will help me survive in the corporate world.

Internalizing Phase

This by far, has been the most exciting phase of SM. The skills that I practiced in the second 33% of the course were really coming to play when it came to reaching the core of a business matter. My approach in class was to listen to everyone, and then begin questioning the assumptions made to clarify the direction, that we as a class were collectively, taking.

I wanted the case that we were presenting in class about Rural Banking to be an exercise to really dig to the core of the case issue. This was enjoyable, as I set a deadline for the learning team to come up with the presentation, practice the parts of the presentation and then come up with a set of slides that were not just clear to look at, but also something that is insightful, impactful, and helps us the presenters, and the class to appreciate the key strategic issue in the case. This was when I realized that this methodology had become a part of me with other subjects when I as an individual and my learning team started getting feedback that we were evolving to become more focused, and structured.

Some of my KEY takeaways on my path to becoming a strategic thinker are:

1.      Management is a People Interacting with People activity. What most people ignore is this critical yet simple aspect of Management.

2.      Common sense is the best friend of the strategic thinker, when data pertaining to a certain case or business situation is missing. Assumptions are rooted, most of the time on instinct, experience, and related facts. While it is a good practice to justify reasons behind assumptions, one of the common pitfalls of assumptions is that, it ignores common sense completely.

3.      Strategic thinking requires the practitioner to understand and relate a multitude of complex issues, however, if I as a practitioner cannot explain the strategic issue in simple words to someone such as my mother, I probably did not get the problem right and I need to relook at the way I thought it through.

4.      The devil is the details, more often than not, the world and businesses will throw a variety of numbers and data that will only confuse the strategic thinker. The key acumen lies in identifying the relevant ones and filtering them through the web of data.

I hope to someday become a CEO and sit on boards of companies. To that pursuit, I am convinced that this course is an important stepping stone. My only regrets about this course are:

1.      The time allotted to this course is too less.

2.      This course should probably be rolled out at the end of the MBA, to tie things up well.

3.      This course focused on getting to the heart of the issue, but what would have been really interesting is to push it further to see how making decisions at the heart affects the rest of business.

That apart the course has been a wonderful start to my quest of becoming a strategic thinker of certain repute.