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What is strategy?
Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Aims and objectives are one thing that perpetually engages the minds of leaders. In order to achieve those aims and objectives strategy is the tool conceived, planned, implemented and managed by leaders. Any various actions of leadership would be part of such leadership strategy. Aims and objectives are the derivatives of vision. Objectives differ from project to project and though there could be several projects being handled by an organization all will have to be generally inline with the vision. Thus a leader who is in command of several projects should be able to device one or several strategies to successfully align the project results with the whole vision of an organization. One of the core competencies of a leadership should be the ability to design, direct, review, correct and refine the strategy to achieve leadership mission.
Strategy design takes into consideration the various resources on hand in a way to strategically apply those resources for optimal outcome. There are numerous and numerous business incidents where companies went into losses owing to wronged marketing strategy, wronged corporate strategy or wronged project management. The reason for wronged strategy could have been owing to inadequacy in strategy design, or gaps of knowledge in the strategy design or absence of logical and pragmatic analysis of various contexts of strategy. A right strategy will see the vision the way we see the unhindered view of a highway. At the same time we need to think about the risks on highway that might interrupt our journey and the alternative recourse to reach our path. Thus strategy should inherently contain the risk management plan so that leadership strategy achieves the envisioned objectives of a project.
(ii) Resources
Very obviously strategy is as good as a piece of paper unless it is supported by resources and required actions. Resource management itself is a strategy again as mostly projects encounter resource crunch at one or other point of project stage. It could be human resources, or material resources or time constraints. Dynamic, decisive and optimal mobilization of resources and application of the same would help in smooth implementation of strategy. We know how military missions handle abrupt resource crunch when the lives of core team members are lost. The leader emerges here as a multi-role player, stakes himself against every want, improvises dynamite out of nothing and confidently overcomes the gaps out of resource crunch. Though every time we may not face a war situation it is the dynamism of the leader that makes all the positive difference to strategy.