 Hey everyone. Welcome back. Sorry about the technical difficulties. Hopefully everyone can see what we're seeing now. If you can, again, let me know in the chat, but I'll hand it back over. We'll keep going. All right. Perfect. Thanks, Mike. So, McAllister's Managing Forces are really another way to look at what influences or what could positively or negatively impact your strategy. So I want to talk about each of those. And as I mentioned, there are two slides on this. So one of the considerations for strategy development is time. So what is the timeline for implementation and is it the right time to implement the strategy? When you think about all of those external factors that we've talked about through pestle analysis, you may find that the timing isn't right to implement a new strategy. So that would be the first consideration. The second consideration is opposing forces. And these are the forces that can maximize added value in terms of strategy. So with opposing forces, we ultimately want to look at those things that could positively or negatively, especially the negative part, impact what we're ultimately trying to do. Politics, of course, I'm sure you recognize this from pestle analysis. This can affect strategy as well. So when you look at the country that you're operating in, you want to make sure that the political factors make sense for you to implement a particular strategy that you want to move toward. Particularly with global companies, this is a challenge because you have, if you're operating in, say, five different countries, you have five different politics and outside forces that you need to be concerned with as you develop a strategy for each of those regions or each of those countries. Perception is also important. So perception refers to how do customers perceive your brand, how do customers perceive the direction that your organization is going. Stakeholders are also important too. And just a reminder, stakeholders are different than stockholders. Stockholders own a piece of the company. While stakeholders is kind of a bigger picture in that stakeholders could be employees, suppliers, customers, people that live in the community in which you operate. So we want to be concerned with all of the stakeholders within our organization and outside of our organization and their perception of our brand and so forth. We also want to look at holistic effects. And this refers to the big picture, those really long term goals that your organization has, say, eight to 10 years from now. We want to make sure, of course, that our strategy fits in with our vision, which we talked about the last time, because our vision and our mission is really going to be our guiding forces as we develop our strategy. So we want to make sure that there's alignment, alignment there. So let's take a look at the other managing forces as well. Are you able to, Mike, are you able to see this next slide perfect. All right, so, so adding value. This is a big one and actually we're going to talk about competitive advantage in unit three and we're going to really take a deep dive into that, because that's probably one of the most important factors when you're determining your strategy. What is your competitive advantage? Are you going to harness for your organization? What is going to make, what makes you different from other competitors that are selling the exact same product or service. So that's a big consideration. And again, we'll address that a little bit more in unit three. We also want to look at incentives specifically for employees. What incentives are we going to put into place for our employees to help us meet our goals, our strategic goals and objectives? We also want to consider learning capabilities, which are, how are we going to capture our processes? How are we going to capture knowledge within our organization so that we can create this effective strategy? We also want to look at opportunity cost, and you've probably heard this term before, maybe in an economics course. And from a business perspective and a strategy perspective, opportunity cost means you decide to do this thing. So that means you can't do that other thing. So that's essentially what opportunity cost means in that you really have to make choices because most companies do not have unlimited financial resources or human resources to do everything they'd like to do. So opportunity cost is, okay, if I choose this, what are the things then that I'm not able to do? So that's definitely a consideration as you develop the strategy. A risk is a big one, and we'll talk about this a little bit later in the course, too. What, if you implement this strategy, what are the possible risks that you're taking? This could be things like the most obvious one, maybe financial risk, but it could also be risk to affecting your brand image or some of those more intangible things that are a little bit more difficult to measure. So we want to look at all of the possible risks when we're implementing a strategy and kind of weigh those and make sure that we're okay with the risk that we're taking as we implement the strategy. Finally, and this is the last one, we want to consider leadership style or simply just style. What kind of style is going to be necessary to make this strategy happen? What kind of leadership is needed to drive the strategy and make sure that the goals and objectives are met as you set forth for your strategy? So that's a lot of information, so I'd like to just pause for a second here and ask what questions you have about these managing forces. Again, anyone have any questions? Feel free to put them down in the chat below. We'll get to them. Obviously, if you're watching later, you can put them in the comments and we'll get to them. But we'll give everyone just a second here to see if they have any questions. All right. Well, I think everyone's good for now. So why don't we just, we can move on to the next bit. And again, if anyone has a question about what we just talked about, we can certainly get to it later. So certainly still put it in there if you didn't get a chance. But I'll hand it back. Perfect. Thank you. So one thing that I want to point out as we've been talking about over the last couple of units is that a lot of prep goes into strategy development. So we haven't really even talked yet about how to implement a strategy. Because a lot of this information that we've been discussing about, you know, doing a SWAT analysis and doing a PESTLE analysis and McCollister's managing forces. You'll notice that there's a lot of work that goes into really just before you even start your strategy to think about the direction that you want your organization to go. And one of the ways to do that and we addressed this a little bit last week is through the mission and values and vision statements. So really all three of these should be what drives the strategy. And oftentimes companies will keep the same mission values and vision statement for several years. So we want to make sure that every decision that we make in terms of our strategy ultimately drives toward our mission statement value statement and vision statement. So just want to give you a quick reminder about the difference between those. So a mission statement communicates the organization's reason for being. What is it that we do and what is our focus going to be? A value statement is a little bit different in that a value statement focuses on the beliefs of the organization. So this could be, you know, do no harm to the environment, treat employees fairly, that type of thing. A vision statement is a little bit different from both of those in that it's a declaration of purpose. So when you look at a vision statement, most companies will create their vision statement, which is this very future oriented, you know, five or 10 years out, how they would like things to go, what they would like to see. Whereas the mission statement focuses a little bit more on the how. Here's what we want to do and here's how we plan on doing it. Whereas a value statement is more that emotional approach in terms of how we have these things that we want to do, what is important to us as we do those things. So while these are different, they really all work together and need to be the basis of our strategy. So every decision we make as an organization should be focused on does this need our mission values and vision for the future. So kind of as you probably already guessed, the value of your vision and mission statements is that it provides this common thread. So all employees in your organization and all stakeholders know exactly what you want to accomplish. So a lot of times companies will write vision and mission statements and then they'll just put it on a shelf somewhere and never look at it again. It shouldn't be like that it really should be the driving force so that everyone knows what the goals are what the objectives are what is the direction the company wants to go what do they want to achieve. It clarifies the overarching goal of the organization and equally as important it helps to formulate the strategy. So once you have these written and developed. It's really going to be as we've talked about your driving force, all strategies, all of your goals, all of your objectives will be directly tied back to meeting the mission and the vision of your organization. So this is really the starting point when we think about developing a strategy is we have all of these external and internal factors that we've analyzed. And then next we really want to make sure that our vision vision and mission statements tie to what is needed within within the organization and helps us drive what what decisions we need to make in order to eventually meet our meet our organizational goals. So a couple of characteristics of a mission statement specifically is that they need to be concise. So you'll see if you were to do a search online for mission statements. You'll find that most of them are a sentence or two, maybe three at most so they tend to be really short and really really concise. They're also outcome oriented so it talks about or shows what the company is working toward achieving and what they want to achieve. And it should also be broad you don't want to get into specific goals and objectives with your mission statement. You want a very, very broad focus for the mission statement. So I put two examples here from our readings and you can see that both of these examples, ultimately meet these three, these three things that we've just talked about. They're concise, they're outcome oriented, and also they're very, very broad. So again, this provides a basis for our overall strategy, which helps us then direct the direction that we want to go and then set goals and objectives in order to ultimately meet that strategy. So I'm wondering if you have questions so far. If you do, we'll pause here for a minute and please go ahead and put those in the chat and we'll address them as needed. Okay, well, no questions in the chat right now. Again, just a reminder, if you're coming to this late, leave a comment. We can try and get to it later, but for now we'll just, we'll push on here. Right, the final thing I want us to talk a little bit about here in unit two is when you look at factors of success for strategy. Again, we've done all of this prep work we've done a SWOT analysis we've done a pestle analysis and done a lot of things to really help set us in the right direction to creating the mission and vision statements. But these are a few factors that you also want to consider and we may have mentioned them last week, but I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into these and and further define them in terms of strategy development. So, the first is that the strategy has to be suitable. So, the, the organization must tie the mission and vision into the strategy, and every that should be the basis essentially for all the decisions that you're making in your organization but especially strategy organizations. So, suitability, how well does it tie into the mission, how well does it harness the power of your competitive advantages. In other words, does it make sense. So that would be the first thing that you'll want to consider. The second is feasibility. So, most organizations don't have unlimited funds in order to implement a strategy so when we look at feasibility. We want to make sure that we have the resources available to help us meet the strategy with current or resources that we know we're able to obtain. So, for example, feasibility, maybe there's a strategy to enter into a brand new market, but if the organization doesn't have the money to do that, or the human resources to do that, then the strategy isn't very feasible. So it's important to look at what do we think this is going to cost, what kind of skills, mix of skills do we need with the people that we have with our employees, and are we able to implement it with what we have. So think of feasibility as kind of a checkpoint. You're developing this great strategy, but then you need to take that step back and determine, okay, how expensive is this going to be? Is it something that we can actually do with the current employees that we have? So that's really, really important because you can imagine if it's not feasible and you don't have enough money, for example, to do it. The strategy probably won't work. So think of these factors for success as taking that step back and really checking to see, okay, do we have the money? Do we have the people that are able to effectively implement it? Finally, the other factor for success is acceptability. So what do stakeholders think of this strategy? What are the risk factors and is everybody comfortable with that risk? Oftentimes we find that strategy is developed by say the CEO and some of the executive suite individuals, but they haven't shared the strategy with their employees that are actually going to be implementing this strategy. So we want to make sure even though the CEO, for example, may take the lead on strategy development, we definitely want that employee involvement throughout the process since they're going to be the ones that are going to be helping us implement that. And that's a factor I think that a lot of organizations forget about is ultimately getting that involvement from employees, communicating well what the goals and objectives of the strategy are, and so forth. So this closes us off for Unit 2. As I mentioned earlier, for Unit 3 we're going to focus on competitive advantage and how do you know what your competitive advantage is? We'll talk about some of the tools you can use to help determine your competitive advantage. And from that we'll move into actually writing down that strategy, figuring out what the strategy is. And then of course in future units we'll talk about how to actually implement the strategy and then at the end measure it to see if the strategy is working. But before we close for today, are there any questions about Unit 2 that I can address at this time? And if so please put them in the chat. And while we wait for that, that's a great reminder to everyone that next week at the same time we'll be starting our review of Unit 3, creating a competitive advantage. So make sure you guys are working along, looking at all of the unit resources that are available to you. Again, if you're coming to this late and you have any questions you can leave a comment below that we would get to. Other things to mention if you've been having any sort of trouble we'll be putting the links to the slides in case you had some sort of trouble so that you can see them. And while we're waiting and for anyone to have any questions I just want to of course join everyone in thanking you Lauren for a great job presenting today. And I want to thank everyone who got on for joining us here today. But as of right now I'm not seeing any questions from the chat so I think we'll probably call this one if even me talking this long is giving people time. But thank you everyone for joining us and we'll see you here at the same time next week for part one of our review of Unit 3, creating competitive advantages. Thanks everybody.