It\'s a serie of question, The Leader as a Strategist Report For this assignment

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It's a serie of question,

The Leader as a Strategist Report

For this assignment, you will choose an organization to analyze. This organization can be one you are personally familiar with, or one you have observed to be an effective organization, You now become a newly appointed senior leader in that organization.

As a new leader, you must prepare a report for the CEO that assesses the organization’s overall alignment between its vision, mission, values, and strategy. This report should consist of the following sections:

An analysis of the strategic cascade of the organization
This includes assessing the organization’s strategy and market position. Use the framework implied in Michael Porter’s (1997) article “What is Strategy.” When describing the business strategy of your organization, consider the following questions:

What is the target market (target customer)?

What is your organization's value proposition (How does it deliver value that satisfies the target’s wants and needs?)?

How is your product or service positioned in the market (What specific features and attributes define the product/service and how is its value reflected in its pricing, distribution, marketing communications, etc.?)?

How is your organization sustainably different from your competitors (What is the source of uniqueness and how sustainable is it from being diminished by competitors?)?

A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis
A SWOT analysis is a strategy planning tool that examines both internal and external environments for factors and trends that should shape planning and operations over the next five years. Environmental factors internal to the company are classified as strengths (to be leveraged) or weaknesses (to be mitigated), while external factors are classified as either opportunities (to be pursued) or threats (to be monitored and responded to).

Some primer questions for the SWOT analysis include the following:
Strengths

What advantages does your organization have?

What do you do better than anyone else?

What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others cannot?

What do people in your market see as your strengths?

What factors mean that you "get the sale"?

What is your organization's unique selling proposition (USP)?

Weaknesses

What aspects of your product or service could you improve?

What market segments or competitive areas should you avoid?

What are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses?

What factors can make you lose sales?

Opportunities

What good opportunities can you spot?

What interesting trends are you aware of?

Useful opportunities can come from such things as the following:

Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale

Changes in government policy related to your field

Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on

Local events

Threats

What obstacles do you face?

What are your competitors doing?

Are quality standards or specifications for your job, products, or services changing?

Is changing technology threatening your position?

Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?

A summary of the internal environment, including the organization’s values and the key elements of the organization architecture that influence worker behavior.

Include the following characteristics when analyzing the internal environment:

Structure: This includes the ways the organization assigns formal roles and responsibilities, decision-making authority, expertise and skills, and work tasks. Think of the organization chart and how its implied structure directs the decision making, resource allocation, and workflow of the organization. Is it consistent with the strategy?

Systems: This comprises the information flows that coordinate activities between groups and across the organization structure while helping direct worker behavior, including performance management, financial management, operating, forecasting and planning, and other regulating mechanisms. How do these systems help align workers and their actions with the strategy?

Culture: This consists of the unwritten rules and norms that govern worker behavior and help coordinate the activities across structural boundaries. Is the organization culture an enabler or impediment to the corporate strategy? What specific behaviors embedded in the culture support the strategy? What specific behaviors block the strategy?

A synthesis of the information evaluating the ability of the organization to implement the strategy using Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices (for example, modeling the way) as a framework.

Include answers to the following:Company Culture

Describe the values and culture of your organization.

What are the values of your organization?

How are they reflected in the behaviors you see at work?

Employee Behaviors

Describe the behaviors in your organization.

Are these behaviors consistent with the business strategy?

Where do they conflict with the strategy?

What new behaviors are required to align with the strategy?

Leadership

How might you and other leaders create new behaviors to support the strategy?

What specific actions would you implement to communicate, motivate, model the way, coach, inspire the vision, challenge the process, and encourage the heart?

Your response to each part of the assignment should be approximately three pages.

Your final product will be in a word document and be approximately 6–8 pages

Explanation / Answer

Whilst attempting to answer in 6-8 pages will take forever, I can certainly give you pointers that can be expanded. The company that is being analyzed is a lending institution from financial services sector and one that specializes in auto loan financing.

For the sake of convenience, we will call this firm ABC Financial Services Limited (fictitious name)

The vision and mission statement of ABC Financial Services is all about customer satisfaction and how the firm can deliver on the same. The other aspect of the statement is valuing the company’s human resource and identifying them as the company’s biggest assets. For the above, it becomes very evident that ABC Financial Services is a highly people oriented organization and gives a great amount of regard to the human side of conducting business.

Before understanding the company’s strategy, it is important to mention the business environment in which ABC Financial Services is operating in. The auto finance industry in the country is one of the most developed markets in the corresponding continent. It is a growing market with 74% finance penetration and sub 1% NPA level. The automotive market itself is slated to grow at a CAGR of 13% by value during FY 16 to FY26. The major players in the market are established banks with a market vintage of over 30-50 years, captive financiers, NBFCs and a new breed of lending institutions that are highly technology savvy (called FInTech companies).

Strategy and Market Position

Target Customer: The target customers for ABC Financial Services, broadly, are the following

Within retail segment, customers vary from those who are buying vehicles for their personal use as well as individual taxi drivers, who would want to ply their vehicle for commercial purpose.

Institutional level customers vary from big hotels that would purchase a fleet of vehicles for their guests arriving in various chains within the same city, to big radio taxi companies who buy large number of vehicles for fleet expansion.

Dealer financing, otherwise known as inventory funding is capital financing for dealer principles of various car manufacturers.

Value Proposition

Since financial services offers only an intangible service, the experiential offering is the biggest value proposition that ABC Financial Services delivers to its customers. This includes

Turn-around time (TAT): At a time when the industry average TAT for loan approval (time between a customer’s loan request is filed into a system to the point at which the loan decision is conveyed to the customer) is 6-8 business hours, ABC offers the same at an average of 4 hours.

Information Delivery: Once a customer has availed a loan facility, the customer has full digital access to all the information related to his loan contract through an application (available both in Playstore, and Apple Store) that can be easily installed in ones phone. Information includes loan amount, EMI, tenure, and also opportunities to take top up loans.

Positioning: As opposed to established banks that offer plain vanilla loan products, ABC Financial Services’ loan products are highly customized. For example, most banks offer a very low loan amount to individual taxi owners since this segment represents a somewhat risky category. However, ABC offers a much higher LTV (loan to value ratio) to the same segment. Of course, the pricing of the product is high, which serves as a risk mitigating measure in the event of default.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

Company culture

As mentioned in the vision and mission statement, ABC Financial Services Ltd considers its employees as its greatest assets. With this as a driving strategy, the company gives complete autonomy at both mid-level and top-level managers.

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