A firm with dozens of "leaders" doing their own thing will no achieve its objectives. Rather, firms need their leaders to work together, in traditional leader-follower relationships, in order to achieve their objectives.
The author, however, places too much emphasis on following. One of the key tenets of leadership is to be creative, to add value to the organization. A manager cannot add value if they are merely acting as a robot, dutifully executing orders from above. Indeed, this is not true leadership at all. At each level, the manager must carefully balance the degree to which they should follow with the degree to which they should lead. The organizational structure should permit this. Autocratic firms develop poor leaders because they stifle initiative. Leaders should be free to lead, and to choose the best balance of leading and following.
3) Strategic Approach. Timothy Bullock's discussion of the Capital Care Group case outlines some of the basics of the strategic management process. However, some of the points are made without sufficiently strong understanding of the issues. The strategic management concepts presented are merely a framework -- they are a loose outline of a singular approach. Strategic management does at times flow from the company's mission statement. But it should not be guided by that statement. The mission statement is too often treated as though it is etched in stone. Yet, mission statements are never sufficiently specific...
Moreover, they should be flexible. The author discusses the value of environmental analysis. Yet, mission statements should reflect the outcome of that analysis. The company's mission may have been logical and valid when it was written, but shifts in the environment could make any mission statement outmoded over time. One of the reasons why strategic is dynamic rather than static is because the company's mission and objectives are dynamic. Firms without dynamic objectives are left behind when the operating environment undergoes a shift.
The value of a balanced scorecard is discussed, but its weaknesses were not. The balanced scorecard is based on arbitrary weightings, subject to the evaluation abilities of management. As is the SWOT analysis that goes into a balance scorecard approach. This subjects the strategy to severe limitations. These tools are ultimately just a framework to help ensure management thinks about the problem from a number of different angles and has gathered sufficient information with which to make a decision. There are no right and wrong answers in strategy, except in hindsight. Tools such as these therefore cannot be guaranteed to deliver viable strategy as an output, and managers should remember this at all times. There is simply too much ambiguity in the business world to put stock in absolutist sentiments such as "any options that don't align with the…company's mission statement should be immediately discarded."
