Details of the Chief Executive Strategic Learning Twelve Sessions

BUSINESS PLANNING

Session 1: Understand Business Life Cycle & How It Impacts Your Business
A SME or larger corporation grows, changes, matures and even declines. As a business owner it is important to look at your company in terms of life cycle starting from the entrepreneurial stage. Each stage has its signs, challenges, risks, and rewards. This session helps you examine your company in the context of the environment, to assess at which stage it is at, the risks and challenges it faces, and rewards you can reap if you know what to do.

Coverage:

• The Business Life Cycle – the Four Stages
• Strategy Implications of The Life Cycle on SMEs
• Business Life Cycle & “Cyclicality” & Strategic Implications of “Cyclicality”
• Appropriate Strategies For SMEs at Each Stage
• Forces Affecting Your Company’s Health

Session 2: Find Your Strategic Directions and Identify Your Core Competence With SWOT Analysis
Any business entity - SME, larger local corporation or MNC - faces the temptation of being all things to all men when the going gets tough. Losing focus is a sure way to send an otherwise viable business to its demise. This session helps you carry out a SWOT analysis to identify your business’ weaknesses and strengths, more precisely its core competence. It helps you not just to address external threats, but seize external opportunities.

Coverage:

• Strategic Planning Model For SME: Linking Your Mission and Strategic Direction with Strategic Options & Subsequent Activities
• SWOT Analysis & Its Importance
• Identify Your Company’s Core Competence
• The Strategic Implication of Knowing and Leveraging Your Core Competence
• The Danger of Your Company Trying To Be “All Things To All Men”.

Session 3: Crystallize Your Company’s Vision and Craft Its Mission and Strategy
Companies that do not know where they are going and what to do are drifting along without a rudder and a compass. With the results of Your SWOT analysis you will then develop ideas on how best to crystallize your company’s vision, and craft its mission. You will also get ideas on how to work with your team on the vision, mission and strategy to drive your business ahead despite turbulent times.

Coverage:

• Why Your Vision (also known as Strategic Intent) Is The Starting Point
• Crafting Your Vision, Mission & Strategy
• Getting Involvement & Commitment For Your Vision, Mission & Strategy
• Process of Carrying Out Your Strategy Development
• Communicating Vision, Mission & Strategy To Your People

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Session 4: Product Life Cycle & The Development of Suitable Marketing Strategies
Whether your company sells a physical product or a service, the product life cycle is one of the critical success factors affecting your business viability. In this session you will assess which stage of product life cycle your product or service is at, and what strategy is suitable to manage it.

Coverage:

• Business Life Cycle & Product Life Cycle in the Case of SMEs
• Stages in the Product Life Cycle & Marketing Strategies for Each Stage
• Style, Fashion & Fad Cycles & How To Handle Them
• The Competitive Life Cycle & Its Challenges

Session 5: Build & Manage Your Brand Name
Brand is an important aspect of your marketing strategy. In this session you examine issues on whether or not you should develop a brand, whether you should have a brand when you are not selling your own products, and what to do when you decide to build and manage your brand name.

Coverage:

• The Importance of Brand & What Is a Brand?
• What Do You Want Your Brand To Do For Your Company & Product or Service
• Building Your Brand
• Positioning Your Company & Your Brand
• Elements of Brand Management

Session 6: Select & Manage Your Distribution Channels
Whether you sell a product or a service, you have to distribute it to your customers. You can sell it directly to your final end-user customer, use intermediaries, do franchising, or you can distribute your product through the Internet. This session will provide you ideas to review the way you are selling your product, and whether any changes are needed.

Coverage:

• The Strategic Importance of Distribution Channels to SMEs
• Direct Marketing or Marketing Intermediaries: Basis For The Choice
• Target Customer Base & Distribution Channels
• Evaluating & Changing Channels at Different Product Life Cycle Stages

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT

Session 7: Build Your Team To Carry Out Your Company’s Vision and Strategies
Ultimately it is your people who carry out the company’s vision and strategy. This session serves to help you develop a systematic approach to train, coach, and motivate your people who share your company’s vision and strategy, and to build an effective team.

Coverage:

• Critical Success Factors For Team Work
• Stages of Team Formation & Development
• Appropriate Leadership Styles & Leader Intervention Strategies at Different Stages of Team Formation
• Action Steps in Building Your Company Into a Team
  

Session 8: Develop Leaders In Your Organization
Building a team, implementing change and business strategies require leadership on your part and your managers. This session helps you select your own leadership approaches, and to develop leadership in your people.

Coverage:

• Leader versus Manager
• Developing Your Managers Into Leaders
• Leadership Development Approaches For SMEs
• Tools & Techniques For Management & Leadership Development (E.g. Training, Coaching, Mentoring, Delegation & Empowerment)
• Tracking & Monitoring Development Progress
• Succession Plan

Session 9: Effective Implementation of Organizational Change
Most if not all of the plans you are going to carry out involve change. If change is not handled properly it will not only face strong resistance, but also result in inefficiencies. This session helps you find and adopt relevant ways to implement change more productively in your company.

Coverage:

• Organizational Change Strategies
• Using The Change Process
• Identifying Forces For Change & Against Change In Your Company
• Dealing With Resistance To Change & Getting Buy-In
• How To Embark On Planned Change In Your Company
  

FINANCIAL & EFFICIENCY MANAGEMENT

Session 10: Manage Your Company’s Liquidity
Liquidity crunch is one of the causes that can weaken an otherwise viable company. This session gives you ideas on how best to manage your cash flow and liquidity in the context of your own company.

Coverage:

• Cash flow Vs Profits
• What Constitute Inflows & Outflows?
• How to Manage Cash Flow & Improve Liquidity?
• Budget & Cash Flow Projections
  

Session 11: Legal Aspects of Business
An understanding of the legal process involved in debt collection helps to maintain your company’s financial health. This session also provides an understanding of the Employment Act and issues that are vital to safeguard your company’s interest in relation to your employees.

Coverage:

• Preliminary Investigations on the Debtor
• Initiating a Claim
• Securing & Enforcing Judgments
• Negotiating Settlement During Legal Proceedings
• Applicability of the Employment Act
• Essential Terms and Clauses in Employment Contract
• Termination of Employment Contract & Retrenchment
  

Session 12: Grow Through Continuous Improvement
Your company cannot afford to rest on its laurels. The internal and external environments will inevitably produce the push and pull factors that demand continuous improvements. This session helps you come up with workable ideas on how to maintain continuous improvements in your company.

Coverage:

• Learn a different “way of thinking” about work that includes the use of skills, tools, and techniques that will measurably enhance business results through process improvement
  
• Develop “goal setting,” “plan of action,” and “tracking.”

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