SAFARI A LA ESTRATEGIA

Acceso a documento de presentación del E-Portafolio: E-Portafolio.ppt

Acceso al E-Portafolio en linea:  Alejandra Cornejo Portafolio en linea

Ana Bolena

METODOLOGÍAS PARA CONSTRUIR ESCENARIOS

Imagine you are sitting at your desk in September 2007. The Dow is close to 13,900; U.S. unemployment is 4.5%; and oil is $45 a barrel. You are in the middle of developing your organization’s plans and budgets for 2008. How likely is it that the assumptions in your 2008 plan accurately forecast that in September 2008 the Dow will be below 9,000; U.S. unemployment will have risen to 6.5%, on its way to more than 10%; and oil prices will have risen to more than $140 a barrel before falling below $40 a few months later?

An aberration? Unlikely, not with a European sovereign debt crisis, a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and major health care reform in the United States. Uncertainty, volatility and risk are here to stay. The world has been transformed from a series of loosely connected, reasonably predictable economies to a complex web of relationships where the global impact of local events is felt almost instantaneously.

In this climate the past is not a good predictor of the future. In response to such uncertainty, scenario planning has been used by organizations as diverse as the Australian government, AutoNation, British Airways, Corning, Disney, General Electric, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, JDS Uniphase, KinderCare (a large U.S. chain of day care centers), Mercedes, Royal Dutch Shell, UPS and the World Bank. Today, scenario planning is being widely used by many small and midsize organizations operating in uncertain or volatile markets.

WHAT IS SCENARIO PLANNING?

Scenario planning is a way of understanding the forces at work today, such as demographics, globalization, technological change and environmental sustainability that will shape the future. While the origins of scenario planning were in the world of strategic planning, many organizations now apply scenario planning techniques to the operational planning, budgeting and forecasting processes as a means of evaluating their effectiveness under different sets of assumptions about the future.

Two forces are fueling the increased popularity and use of scenario planning. The first is the rapid and broad global impact of unpredictable events such as 9/11, or the global credit crisis. The second is the accelerated pace at which new trends become material. For example, the rapid growth of China and India, the rise of social media, and smart phone adoption have occurred in a decade or less.

BUILDING SCENARIO PLANS

Scenario planning is largely focused on answering three questions:
What could happen?
What would be the impact on our strategies, plans and budgets?
How should we respond?




TEXTO COMPLETO en  http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2011/Mar/20103483.htm

Ramiro Alem y Martín dos Ramos Farías en su tesis de Maestría de Dirección de empresas por la Universidad UCEMA nos presentan sus conclusiones para gestionar y ganar en un contexto de cambios y turbulencias.


Toda crisis  o  turbulencia  conlleva  problemas  y  oportunidades.  Una empresa, durante
una  situación de estas  características, puede  deteriorarse  notablemente  o bien  salir
beneficiada.
Pareciera que el proceso de planeamiento estratégico tradicional no aporta demasiado en
estos contextos, ya que es un proceso demasiado esquematizado y poco flexible.
Se hace necesario un sistema y proceso de planeamiento estratégico que realmente estén
“vivos” y acompañen a la empresa durante las crisis.
Este nuevo proceso de planeamiento estratégico debe preparar a las empresas para las
turbulencias, debe  proponer flexibilidad,  alternativas  y  adaptaciones  estratégicas  al
medioambiente de negocios.
Además debe promover el conocimiento profundo de la situación y la creatividad a la
hora de planificar escenarios y tomar decisiones.
Sólo  las  empresas  que estén dispuestas  a  cambiar  la  forma en que  ven  y  utilizan  el
planeamiento  estratégico, podrán beneficiarse al  aprovechar  las  ventajas  que  toda
situación de crisis presenta.
Entonces, los puntos claves y coincidentes en todos los enfoques analizados se podrían
listar de la siguiente forma, como guía a la hora de reformular el modo de planificar y
actuar ante la crisis:
1. Primera etapa: Preparándose para la crisis.
- Institucionalice la planificación para tiempos turbulentos.
- Aunque el  negocio vaya  bien,  prepárese  para  lo  inesperado  y  planifique
escenarios alternativos si es posible.
- Rediseñe su esquema de planeamiento estratégico si ve que no le esta ayudando
a prepararse para contingencias y si ve que no lo esta ayudando a aumentar la
creatividad de su equipo para tomar decisiones en tiempo real.
- Actúe rápido y sin perder tiempo en correcciones innecesarias.
- Revise  su posición  estratégica, participación de  mercado  y  su  fortaleza
financiera.
2. Segunda etapa: Identificando el tipo y nivel de turbulencia.
- Identifique el origen de la turbulencia y su nivel.
- Insista hasta poder poner un marco a la situación de incertidumbre y turbulencia.
No  importa cuán  alta  sea  la  incertidumbre  y  confusa  parezca  la  situación,
siempre hay elementos en el mismo medioambiente que pueden servir de guía
para poder actuar de manera exitosa.
- Nunca se base en corazonadas a la hora de hacer un análisis de situación.
- Evite lo tradicional y ponga las herramientas analíticas y procesos al servicio del
negocio, en vez de lo opuesto.
- Focalícese en  algo  central  que  genere  valor  y sirva  de  guía  para  la  toma  de
decisiones.
3. Tercera etapa: Familiarizándose con la crisis y adaptando las estrategias
y planes.
- Conserve su capacidad de visión estratégica incluso durante la tormenta.
- Siempre sea flexible y no dude en cambiar las estrategias si es necesario.
- La adaptación  es  una  de  las  claves  para  poder sacar  ventajas  de este  tipo de
situaciones.
- A pesar de los cambios y adaptaciones que imponga la crisis, nunca deje de ser
disciplinado en cuanto al método que ha definido para atacar la misma.
- Genere alternativas, no apueste todo a una sola estrategia ganadora.
No hay garantías en ningún caso, pero pareciera que hay un patrón de comportamiento
emergente que debería ser tenido en cuenta

Strategy at the edge of chaos

EXTRACTO DEL ARTÍCULO DE by Eric D. Beinhocker para MacKinsey Company

"Fishbowl" economics once provided the basis of corporate strategy. No more
New theories show markets are "complex adaptive systems"
Making your company an evolver
Are we more than blind players in an evolutionary business game?

The new approach to economics has important implications for management, and in particular for strategy and organization. Although it is still in its infancy, we can begin to see how it might help us gain fresh insights into a host of difficult questions. Why do industries that look stable suddenly get turned upside down? How can companies develop strategies in the face of uncertainty? Why are big companies that seem to have it all so often vulnerable to attack by small upstarts?
Let's begin by considering where traditional thinking on management comes from, and how it is based on a central metaphor that originated in physics and was adopted by economics.

The roots of management thinking

Many of the most successful and widely used strategy tools today - the five forces framework, cost curves, the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) model, and the concept of sustainable competitive advantage, to name a few - owe their origins to ideas developed in the 1950s in a field known as the theory of industrial organization. IO theory, which is concerned with industry structure and firm performance, is in turn based on microeconomic theory.
Modern neoclassical microeconomics was founded in the 1870s by Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, and Carl Menger, and synthesized into a coherent theory by Alfred Marshall at the turn of the century. Seeking to make economics more scientific, Walras, Jevons, and Menger had borrowed ideas and mathematical apparatus from the leading science of their day, energy physics. Twenty years earlier, Julius Mayer, James Prescott Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Ludwig August had achieved breakthroughs in energy physics that paved the way for thermodynamics. The early neoclassicists copied the mathematics of mid-nineteenth-century energy physics equation by equation, translating it metaphorically (and, according to many physicists, incorrectly) into economic concepts.
Another neoclassicist, Irving Fisher, showed in his 1892 doctoral thesis how the physicists' "particle" became the economists' "individual," "force" became "marginal utility," "kinetic energy" became "total expenditure," and so on. Although microeconomic theory has undergone many changes over the past century, the core ideas developed by Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, and the other early neoclassicists still resonate in economics textbooks today.(*)
Here can be found the roots of management's family tree, from Mayer and early thermodynamics through Marshall and microeconomics to Michael Porter and the five forces model of strategy. This intellectual lineage still affects the way we approach management today.



Early thinking on management

The new economics has advanced far enough for us to begin to make preliminary hypotheses about its implications for strategy and organization. One characteristic of complex adaptive systems is punctuated equilibrium. This natural endogenous feature of the evolutionary process occurs when times of relative calm and stability are interrupted by stormy restructuring periods, or "punctuation points." Punctuated equilibrium makes it difficult for participants to survive for long periods, as their strategies and skills tend to get finely optimized for the stable periods and then suddenly become obsolete when the inevitable restructuring takes place. Similarly, companies have a hard time surviving the upheavals, shakeouts, and technology shifts that punctuate the evolution of markets. To prosper in the long run, a company must adapt as readily as its market, or more so. More specifically, it must be both a strong competitor in the current regime and a smart evolver, able to innovate ahead of the market or to adapt with it.


The equilibrium view of strategy has focused on how to be a good competitor; let us consider five critical aspects of being a good evolver.



1. Focused versus robust strategies
Traditional strategy tends to emphasize a single focused line of attack—a clear statement of where, how, and when to compete. In a complex adaptive system, a focused strategy to dominate a niche is necessary for day-to-day survival but not sufficient in the long run. Given an uncertain environment, strategies must also be robust—that is, capable of performing well in a variety of possible future environments.5
2. Competitive advantage versus continuous adaptation
Evolutionary systems exhibit a phenomenon known as the Red Queen effect, after that character's remark in Through the Looking Glass: "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."6 In nature, the Red Queen effect is at work when a predator learns to run faster; its prey responds by acquiring better camouflage; the predator then develops a better sense of smell; the prey starts to climb trees; and so on. Evidence suggests that the business world resembles a Red Queen race. A study of the performance of more than 400 companies over 30 years reveals that firms find it difficult to maintain higher performance levels than do their competitors for more than about five years at a time (Exhibit 3). Long-term superior performance is achieved not through sustainable competitive advantage but by continuously developing and adapting new sources of temporary advantage and thus being the fastest runner in the race.



3. Conservative operator versus radical innovator
In a complex adaptive system, an agent that is resistant to change and not adaptable will have low fitness, and so, conversely, will an agent that is oversensitive to shifts in its environment and constantly making radical responses. But between these extremes of stasis and chaos lies a region—the edge of chaos—where fitness is maximized (Exhibit 4). Being at the edge of chaos means something more subtle than pursuing a moderate level of change. At the edge of chaos, one is simultaneously conservative and radical.

Evolution is adept at keeping things that work while at the same time making bold experiments. The morphology of the spinal cord is a robust adaptation that has survived eons of evolution and enormous environmental shifts. Yet nature has experimented wildly around this core idea, producing vertebrates that range from birds to whales to humans.
The Walt Disney Company is a firm that prospers at the edge of chaos. Its theme parks and other businesses are run in a deeply conservative fashion. A strong culture supports Disney's mission of providing family entertainment. In operations, no detail is too small, right down to the personal grooming of the parking-lot attendants. This culture is ingrained in the organization and constantly reinforced through management processes.
At many organizations, such a conservative culture and such tightly controlled operations would snuff out creativity. Yet Disney manages to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. It pioneered animated films and destination theme parks, built EPCOT, linked media and retail with its Disney Stores, and took an early lead in cable television. Disney manages the tension between conservatism and innovation by maintaining an almost cultlike attention to detail and discipline but at the same time forgiving honest mistakes made in the pursuit of innovation.
4. Routinized versus diverse strategies
Another requirement for success in evolutionary systems is a rich pool of possible strategies. This diversity represents the source of the innovations that keep a player ahead in the Red Queen race and can be drawn on to develop responses when the environment changes. But diversity also has its cost. Many mutations are harmful and selected against, limiting the diversity found in a species. Moreover, a certain level of standardization is beneficial: a relatively narrow range of mating behavior, for example, probably makes it easier for interested parties to find one another. Evolution strikes a balance, standardizing designs that work but seeding the population with enough variation to provide a basis for future innovation and adaptation.
Few companies are skilled at striking this balance. The result is firms that are either chaotic or vulnerable at punctuation points because they no longer have a well-stocked pool of ideas and experiences from which to draw.
5. Scale versus flexibility
In traditional strategic and organizational thinking, big is good. Benefits of scale are easy to identify in purchasing, operations, marketing, and so on. Why is it, then, that big companies can have such a hard time responding to attacks by smaller competitors? A complexity-based view can shed light on the downside of size.
A simple system with relatively few parts and interconnections isn't highly adaptable: the number of states it can manifest is small compared with the number of situations it might encounter. As the system grows bigger and more complex, the number of states it can manifest, and thus its repertoire of possible responses to changes in its environment, grows exponentially. However, beyond a certain level of scale and complexity, its adaptiveness drops off rapidly in what Stuart Kauffman calls a complexity catastrophe. This occurs when the epistasis, or interaction between the parts, builds to such an extent that any positive change in one part has ripple effects that cause negative changes elsewhere. The system thus becomes more conservative as it grows, and finding adaptations that don't have harmful side effects gets harder and harder.
When Dell Computer began to do well at selling inexpensive personal computers by mail, no doubt someone at IBM said, "Why don't we do that too?" But IBM couldn't follow suit without damaging its extensive distribution channels of dealers and direct salespeople. Its history and size created a trade-off that Dell didn't face and made it difficult for IBM to respond.
Companies can mitigate the effect of complexity catastrophes through strategic and organizational changes. GM started Saturn in a greenfield organization precisely to free it from the constraints of corporate bureaucracy. AT&T split itself in three to create smaller organizations and reduce strategic conflict.


Becoming competitors and evolvers

As a complexity-based view of economics develops, new tools will be devised to help managers fashion better-evolving companies. Some of these tools will be analytical: options theory and evolutionary modeling to help develop robust strategies, for example. Others will be conceptual: new organizational forms that help avert complexity catastrophes, say, or practices that promote a rich fund of ideas.
Becoming a better evolver will be a major challenge for most companies; it is difficult enough just to be a successful competitor. And how do you motivate a thriving organization in a stable regime to take on the task of becoming more innovative and adaptive so as to meet challenges it can't even foresee? Equally, a company struggling through a major punctuation point finds it hard to worry about its long-term evolvability.
But for companies that do accept the challenge, the payoff promises to be considerable. Unlike creatures in nature, we are not blind, passive players in the evolutionary game. Through the sciences of complexity, we can come to understand how evolution works, the tricks it has up its sleeve, and the skills needed to survive in a complex world. If we do so, we may be able to harness one of the most powerful forces of all: evolution will then be the wave we ride to new levels of creativity and innovation rather than the tide that washes over us.

Estrategias para el manejo de la incertidumbre en la administración de negocios

EDICIÓN DIGITAL DEL LIBRO


La mayoría de los gerentes se enfrentan al riesgo y la ambigüedad en forma equivocada. Courtney ofrece un espléndido itinerario para hacer bien las cosas. Aceptemos la incertidumbre en lugar de esconderla, puesto que en sus íntimos rincones esperan grandes oportunidades de éxito.
Este libro representa un gran paso adelante para dominar la incertidumbre.

Breafigroup una agencia privada de consultoría estratégica británica nos proporciona una reseña de la importancia de la herramienta Scenario planning en la Planeación estratégica.

Determine corporate and financial strategic options

You have already learned about reviewing and evaluating present and future strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, including a scan of the internal and external environments.


The next stage is to formulate strategy. Although described as a series of exercises leading to an outcome, in practice this should be an ongoing process; maybe an annual corporate retreat combined with a review at every board meeting, or on a quarterly basis.


A lot of strategic planning fails because of incompetence or indifference on the part of those responsible for the strategic plan. Reviews should determine how strategy has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new competitors, a new economic environment, or a new social, financial, or political environment.


Vision, mission and values can be consistent over the long term, but strategies and tactics need to be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances.


Strategy is about the future. Consequently it requires assessment of the possible behaviours of both markets and competitors, as well as opportunities for co-operation and strategic alliances.

Strategy and tactics

Strategy is the large-scale plan for making the vision happen. Tactics are the specific actions involved in following the plan
Many people find strategic thinking difficult and easily revert to tactical thinking instead.
If strategic planning is to be more than a superficial update of an existing plan, it requires a discipline that includes elements of creativity, lateral thinking and 'thinking outside the box'.


Brefi Group specialises in helping boards by facilitating off-site, often residential, corporate retreats. These give directors an opportunity to escape the normal pressures and broaden their thinking through a structured process that incorporates a return to vision, mission, values, an environmental scan with SWOT and PEST, and a scenario planning exercise that leads to option generation and strategy development.

A scenario planning approach

Brefi Group uses a strategy building process based on a scenario planning model developed in South Africa by Chantell Ilbury and Clem Sunter.


The key discipline in this process is identifying those things that you do know but cannot control. For example: exchange rates fluctuate, interest rates change, taxes, weather. From these you can learn more about what you can control.


The next stage is to identify the things that you do not know and cannot control. These include things like actual rates of exchange, interest rates, taxes and rates of tax, and actual weather – place and date. From these, you can identify the key uncertainties – those that will have the greatest impact on the success or failure of a strategy. By putting these together in different mixes you can create three or more scenarios, and then develop and test different potential strategies in each one.


Finally choose a strategy that has the optimum balance between robustness and potential success.


The process is shown in the diagram below, from which you can see how the classic PEST and SWOT analyses contribute.

Corporate governance

Does your board determine corporate and financial strategic options, review and select those to be pursued, and decide the resources, contingency plans and means to support them?
If so, are the strategic options:
Generated creatively?
Evaluated systematically in view of the organisation's mission, objectives and values?
Once options are chosen, are they:
Resourced effectively, taking into account likely risks and financial considerations?
Supported with realistic contingency plans in the event of failure, or unexpected developments?
"Owned" by those on the board who have to carry them out?
Fuente: http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/directors/e-course/strategy/determine_corporate_and_financial_strategic_options.html