Gary Hamel, a lecturer at London Business School and C.K Prahalad who’s a professor at University of Michigan wrote an article named; Strategic Intent which indicates out a new force came in the field of management. The article got published in the Harvard Business Review in 1989 and since then it had been very popular. The article basically illustrates the points that to achieve success a company needs to connect its end to its mean through Strategic intent.
Following are its three attributes namely:
1-Sense of Direction:
It states that a company must set long term goals and targets which can guide them into which direction they need to head onto in the long run.
2-Sense of Discovery:
This implies that a company must have a competitive advantage and must possess the potential to seek new discoveries.[sky]
3- Sense of Destiny:
A sense of destiny also matter as it plays a major role in the success or failure of a company.
The strategic intent also involves three steps such as:
1- Setting up of the Strategic Intent:
The above mentioned attributes are under this step.
2- Setting up of the Challenges:
The correct identification of the challenges that need to be undertaken by the company and how well it’s going to be communicated to the whole company as this leads to increase the performance level.
3- Employee Empowerment:
The employees need to get empowered in order to enhance their performance; it develops a sense of responsibility amongst the employees and accountability about their work.
In this article, Hamel and Prahalad talks about the corporate leaders whose ambitions were beyond out of their resources and capabilities. These individuals had the desire of winning and who had come along working in upwards within their organizations and later turned on towards seeking global leadership. One of those great individuals is the CEO of General Electric’s, Jack Welch who had accomplished tremendous things for his company.
The authors think that when a company consider about the strategic Intent and the global leadership, the core competencies become clearly important. In a time of discontinuous change like economic and political events, things may turn to be unpredictable and it’s the core corporate competency of a company that keep up its employees resilient and adaptable to endure any crisis. However this is quite difficult and this is where the senior managerial leadership plays a pivotal role in an organization.
The basic essence behind Strategic Intent lies in having a competitive advantage. An organization has to keep enhancing its existing skills and knowledge and needs to learn new ones to keep its organization at its strong competitive advantage.
All the world’s global leaders had one thing in common; they had ambitions beyond their resources and potentials. Due to their Strategic Intent they were able to sustain their obsession of winning and foster growth. They had their own competitive advantage and own strategic placement which made them stood out where they aimed to be. To work on Strategic intent it requires a deep commitment from all the players of the organization.