Strategic Management For Africa

Creating and delivering increasing value as perceived by customers in change are the hallmarks of a predominantly excellent organisation. Doing better than the competitors should come about as a result of creating capacity and capability to create and deliver currently perceived customer value, not merely as a result of maintaining competitiveness, by focusing on competitors’ actions. Creating excellence in African institutions and maintaining it will require among other things the following to be taken into serious account:

·        ICT Competence and Capability for Excellence: In the new world of e-business in which organisations find themselves, literally everything is in a state of flux. Traditional concepts of industries, organisations, products, services, marketing and distribution, to mention but a few, are all changing. Some have changed so much that they are unrecognizable in their original forms or structures. Is the ICT investment adequate to cope with this scenario? Senior management and staff will need to be adept at creating and applying new knowledge, as well as updating and upgrading existing knowledge archived in our databases. ‘Do we have them anyway?’ All perceptive organisations now need to ask themselves these and similar questions constantly.

·        Industry-wide, Regional and Continental Networking Collaborative Arrangements: Forming partnerships, alliances and associations that create and add value for our customers shall be imperative. The synergies here can be exploited in such ways that are mutually complementary in capacity enhancement of involved institutions. In this way institutional customers and the general public stand to benefit by getting value for their money through successful alliances, partnerships and other forms of purposeful networking arrangements.

·        Leadership and Management Capacitation: Like many upcoming organisations and institutions in Africa, they will need to continuously invest in leadership and managerial capacities consistent with capabilities that are in tune with enhanced value creation and delivery to customers, hence creating excellence. The advantage of this investment in the leaderships and management strategic flexibility is that it allows for innovativeness and individual creativity to permeate the modern organisation. Future leadership and management in organisations must attract enterprising talent that complements them. They must reward and respect such talent. They should not tolerate mediocrity in their midst.

·        Value Adding Strategic Staff Retreats: These will have to focus on building and maintaining sustainable capability to discern changing customer value perceptions. (Incremental improvements on how things are done will no longer do). In this way the most inner innovative ideas will be harvested by the serious organisation determined to maintain and enhance ‘excellence’. Dishing out orders and instructions to professionals on how to proceed with a strategic planning retreat is a misplaced approach because a strategic retreat