Session Four - Madonna

Madonna has always managed to be modern ,contemporary, relevant and re-invented herself. This has allowed her to have sustainable success.

Madonna has always used her image effectively a sex iconic to attract wide customer base. However, Madonna at the age of fifty must realise to maintain competitive advantage she needs to find new talents and recruit them, in other words, she should be a producer and develop her own prodigy.

Icons like Madonna applied the true sense of flexibility, staying relevant to her industry by adopting culture of constant renewed challenges to status quo and hence remaining relevant in the minds of people which is the essence of why she is the highest ever paid female singer. What is unique about Madonna is her recopy for success is un-replicable by her rivals.

Session Three - NHS

What can we learn about effective Strategic Leadership from the Gerry Robinson case study? What were the most memorable examples of effective or ineffective strategic leadership?

Gerry Robinson was never intimidated by the complexity of the NHS which is the third largest organisation in the world. He said "Good management is simply good management, no difference between managing a corner shop and large organisation such as NHS; this entails the believe and the confidence that he could analyse and diagnose the strategic issues with NHS. He wore Surgeon's uniform in order to come across as a legitimate expert in the medical field rather than wearing a suit and tie for appearing to be bureaucratic office manager. 

Gerry Robinson was able to question all the different groups involved in the hospital such as the management, consultants and nurses. He found out that there were no structure in the internal management of the hospital for example nobody could positively indentify who was in charge and the management could not enforce any policy and are there as caretakers. He found out that waiting time could be dramatically reduced by persuading the consultants/surgeons to work on Fridays. 

What did you learn about persuasion and influencing from the case study and from today’s session?

Gerry Robinson persuaded by bringing facts that theatres are poorly utilised and revealed that many theatres are just empty and can definitely be used for operations. He also persuaded that doctors could work a little bit more hours.

How does this case study compare with Carrefour? Any major similarities or differences?

Carrefour's strategic issues are loosing profit by not embracing technological changes such as providing online services as well as the company's creditors are asking for quick turnaround of profit-making which does not give a chance for the process of changes to take an effect into converting the organisation to be profitable. However NHS's issues is organisational structure failure which resulted long waiting lists for patients. The similarity is that both organisations are not meeting their targets and both leaders of the organisations failed to persuade their respective followers to embrace their ideologies.  

Session Two - Bread, cheese, new boss?

 
What do you think about Carrefour and the CEO? Could he have done a better job? What would a good strategic leader do?

 The leader of Carefour could have identified the strategic issues with his company such as loosing in touch with customers through not having online service, not providing cheap products, not understanding the competition in the market. The CEO failed to identify the going forward strategy for his company.

Think about your participation in the group exercise – how did it differ from last week? What went well or not so well?

 I have participated in my group fairly well. We looked at the issues of the strategy of Carefour objectively and maintained to have a common goal. 

What do you want to remember from this week?

I intent to be literate in strategy weakness in order to be able to identify where strategy is missing.