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Assignment ST 2

This document contains an assignment for a strategic thinking course, including questions about environmental scanning, challenges to strategic thinking, and attributes of strategic thinking. For the first question, the student's answer discusses factors to consider when scanning the business environment, including events, trends, issues, and expectations. For the second question, the biggest challenges to strategic thinking are identified as making time for thinking, gaining commitment, prioritizing strategic work, and resisting the status quo. The third question is answered by outlining five attributes of strategic thinking proposed by Liedtka: having a holistic view, focusing on intent, thinking in time, being hypothesis-driven, and recognizing opportunities.

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Chau To
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46 views

Assignment ST 2

This document contains an assignment for a strategic thinking course, including questions about environmental scanning, challenges to strategic thinking, and attributes of strategic thinking. For the first question, the student's answer discusses factors to consider when scanning the business environment, including events, trends, issues, and expectations. For the second question, the biggest challenges to strategic thinking are identified as making time for thinking, gaining commitment, prioritizing strategic work, and resisting the status quo. The third question is answered by outlining five attributes of strategic thinking proposed by Liedtka: having a holistic view, focusing on intent, thinking in time, being hypothesis-driven, and recognizing opportunities.

Uploaded by

Chau To
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 6

FOREIGN TRADE UNIVERSITY

HO CHI MINH CITY CAMPUS

ASSIGNMENT
COURSE: Strategic Thinking INTAKE:1945515704

Student: Tô Bửu Châu

Lecturer 1: Phạm Hùng Cường

Lecturer 2:

HO CHI MINH CITY, August 2020


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QUESTION(S)

1. The factors of environment scanning


2. The biggest challenge to strategic thinking
3. What are attributes of strategic thinking

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ANSWER

1. Factors of environmental scanning:


The purpose of the scan is the identification of opportunities and threats
affecting the business for making strategic business decisions. As a part of the
environmental scanning process, the organization collects information regarding its
environment and analyzes it to forecast the impact of changes in the environment.
This eventually helps the management team to make informed decisions.

Components of a Business Environment

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Before scanning the environment, an organization must take the following
actors into consideration:

o Events – These are specific occurrences which take place in different


environmental sectors of a business. These are important for the functioning
and/or success of the business. Events can occur either in the internal or the
external environment. Organizations can observe and track them.
o Trends – As the name suggests, trends are general courses of action or
tendencies along which the events occur. They are groups of similar or related
events which tend to move in a specific direction. Further, trends can be
positive or negative. By observing trends, an organization can identify any
change in the strength or frequency of the events suggesting a change in the
respective area.
o Issues – In wake of the events and trends, some concerns can arise. These are
Issues. Organizations try to identify emerging issues so that they can take
corrective measures to nip them in the bud. However, identifying emerging
issues is a difficult task. Usually, emerging issues start with a shift in values or
change in which the concern is viewed.
o Expectations – Some interested groups have demands based on their concern
for issues. These demands are Expectations.
2. Biggest challenges to strategic thinking:
TIME
When asked, “How are you doing?” Most of us say, “Busy!” Staying busy is
the norm at work because in today’s society we’re rewarded for doing, not thinking.
When we are constantly told to “stay busy”, how can we create time to think?
COMMITMENT
Commitment is synonymous with buy-in. 72 percent of managers felt that a
lack of commitment from others on their team held them back. It’s not enough to
develop strategic ideas. Ideas are great, but we also need execution; we need support,
energy, and passion to follow through with a team and business.

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PRIORITIES
Strategic thinking and planning falls in the Important and Not Urgent quadrant.
Unfortunately, this is a much-neglected area of our lives. Because we are so focused
on staying busy, Urgent items always get done.
STATUS QUO
We all complain about the status quo around us. 56 percent of managers in the
study stated this as a challenge. You may have heard this stated as, “But we’ve
always done it this way.” There is a status quo bias in all of us; it’s is part of our
human nature to resist change and keep things as they are. This explains why we
enjoy dreaming of change and even suggesting it to others while the gap between our
own knowing and doing widens.
3. Liedtka (1998) posits five major attributes of strategic thinking:
i. Strategic thinking reflects a systems or holistic view that appreciates how the
different parts of the organization influence and affect each other as well as their
different environments.
ii. Strategic thinking embodies a focus on intent. In contrast with the traditional
strategic planning approach that focuses on creating a ‘‘fit’’ between existing
resources and emerging opportunities, strategic intent intentionally creates a
substantial ‘‘misfit’’between these.
iii. Strategic thinking involves thinking in time. Strategic thinkers understand the
interconnectivity of past, present and future.
iv. Fourth, it is hypothesis driven. Hypothesis generating and testing is central to
strategic thinking activities. By asking the creative question ‘‘What if?’’ followed by
the critical question ‘‘If . . . then . . .?’’ strategic thinking spans the analytic-intuitive
dichotomy that Mintzberg refers to in his definition of thinking as synthesis and
planning as analysis.
v. Strategic thinking invokes the capacity to be intelligently opportunistic, to
recognize and take advantage of newly emerging opportunities.
Napier and Albert (1990) referring to system thinking, thinking about long-
term profits rather than short-term benefits, identifying repetitive patterns in the

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events, choosing a person responsible for strategic thinking, making use of past
events to predict future, using past knowledge to prepare appropriate model for
decision making.
Bonn (2005) emphasizing on process approach, using cognitive concepts,
ability in finding different solutions for specific problems, interaction among
strategies at different levels and between different units of organizations,
understanding the dynamics of internal and external environment, understanding the
situation of organizations within bigger systems, visualizing future goals and most
advantageous future, knowing new competitive areas, capability of integrating
different ideas into a new and fresh idea.

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