Strategy in Action

Issued: Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:13:00 BST

The Adam Smith Business School, in collaboration with Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank, is delighted to host the Strategy in Action course on 16 - 17th April 2013 in the Clydesdale Bank Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow.

This two day course will deal with the strategic direction of your business. As such, it seeks to encourage strategic thinking and leadership within your firm and to deliver sustainable competitive advantage. Using a range of analytical tools and techniques the workshop sessions will allow you to generate practical and actionable insights which will hone the competitiveness of your business. Further, the sessions are driven by a diagnostic process based on research conducted with over four hundred firms and this diagnostic ensures that each participant firm focuses attention on those areas of development that are specific to its needs.

Presenting Team:
Donald MacLean is a Professor in the University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School and Robert MacIntosh is a former Professor of the Business School and is now working at Heriot Watt University. Both Professors have a combined experience of more than thirty years of researching strategic management. A physicist and an engineer respectively, they bring a pragmatic focus to the subject and have worked successfully for a range of large corporate, SME and public sector organisations both directly and through third parties such as the Institute of Directors.

Itinerary
Day 1 : Strategic Analysis

Day 2: Strategy in Action

Session Insight

Session 1 : Strategic Intent and Leadership… .the role of business leaders in developing vision, strategic intent and mission in your company. This introductory session will also link culture to strategy.

Session 2 : Foresight…. developing a view of key environmental trends and developing intelligence on the ways in which the environment might shape the future of your business.

Session 3 : Capability…. this session focuses attention on your firm’s resources and analyses the relative strengths of your business to ensure that these are (a) sufficient and (b) sustainable.

Session 4 : Customers and Competitor …. the final session of the first day identifies current and potential competitors as well as helping specify the basis of competition within different customer groups.

Session 5 : Strategic Options…. using a structured approach, this session helps specify a limited number of plausile strategic options to deliver your strategy, then these options are subjected to a structured evaluation proess.

Session 6 : Strategy Building…. drawing together insights and outcomes from the previous five sessions, each business will produce a strategy statement which encapsulates its future direction.

Session 7 : Presentations…. participating businesses are invited to draw together insights generated and next steps.

Speaker Profiles

Professor Robert MacIntosh
Qualifications – BEng Manufacturing Engineering and Management
PhD in Engineering Management, CEng, MIET

Role - Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Glasgow and visiting professor at Strathclyde, St Andrews and Edinburgh Business School.

Robert has held a variety of managerial posts and has designed, managed and delivered executive programmes for a range of public sector organisations and FTSE listed firms including Babcock International Group, Scottish and Southern Energy and NHS 24. He has delivered strategy workshops to over one hundred organisations and has developed a strategy diagnostic process which offers bespoke strategy and business development outcomes to firms.

He works extensively with senior managers on strategic issues using a range of qualitative methods and has published a range of articles on the relevance debate in management research. His consulting experience includes work with a number of listed businesses in the UK and internationally as well as large public organisations such as the NHS and HMRC in addition to a significant number of small to medium sized firms. His engineering training has led to a focused, practical and evidenceoriented approach to strategy development and his main research interests lie in the related problems of the developing of strategy within organisations and effecting strategic change in organisations. He has published in the world’s top strategy journals and has delivered postgraduate courses in strategy and change at a number of UK and international universities.

He has 20 years experience of consulting and executive development and in recent years he has co-chaired the Action
Research SWG of the European Group for Organization Studies and been a member of Council for the British Academy of
Management. His book on managing change is published by Cambridge University Press and he is currently writing a book on strategic management for Palgrave.

Professor Donald Maclean
Senior Research Fellow, University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School

Donald’s interests lie in the development of innovative approaches to strategy, leadership and management within and between organisations. He has published extensively in top international journals including The Strategic Management Journal, The British Journal of Management, Organisation Studies, Human Relations and Journal of Management Studies. He is a member of the director development faculty of the Institute of Directors in Scotland and, in addition to his academic work, has experience of industry and management through previous industrial posts, numerous action-research projects and ongoing strategic management coaching and consultancy.