Description
PROGRAM OUTLINE
Build your strategic leadership skills with this program. Its goal is to activate a mind-set that enables you to become a proactive innovator driving a culture of innovation. Focused on strategic thinking and strategic intent in the face of complexity, ambiguity, and risk, it transforms you into a contextual leader with the capacity for flexibility, agility and non-rational decision making.
The program uses a business case study to help you assess key issues and vulnerabilities faced by a supply chain. Through this interactive exercise, you gain a template that you can use to build your own innovation framework, applying the different perspectives and insights obtained through the program.
This program is recommended for seasoned professionals with strategic-level experience.
Key Benefits
- Enhance your strategic leadership and contextual intelligence capabilities
- Improve your decision-making by examining implied & cognitive biases
- Create ideas on socially responsible strategies while optimizing business goals
- Develop your strategic scenario-planning abilities
- Deepen your understanding of divergent/convergent thinking as a focusing technique
- Walk away with a business analytics toolkit and innovation framework to apply to your workplace
Format
- This is a self-directed online program consisting of pre-work and five modules (called building blocks).
- You are given six weeks to complete each module.
- Average time commitment is 4 hours per week.
- Start at any time. Available 24/7.
The program consists of three progressive stages: Imagine, Innovate and Build.
PREP-WORK: Before starting the first stage, you must complete a pre-work exercise: Your Why.
Your Why identifies your core values; and your values drive your actions. By innovating, you sustain your personal Why and build on your values.
This stage consists of three building blocks:
| 1: Community Centric Vision | - Learn about your covert and overt constraints to improve collaboration - Examine the implicit and cognitive biases affecting your decision-making - Identify repeated thinking patterns that can lead to inaccurate conclusions |
| 2: Community Co-creation | - Increase awareness of stakeholder perspectives to improve engagement and contribution - Develop an external mindset by pro-actively considering external factors at play At this stage, you will focus on Zara and the world of Fast Fashion as a case study. |
| 3: Value Chain Analysis | - Build on the Zara fast fashion case - Conduct a Value Chain Analysis using four different analytical tools: Company Value Creation, Market Leadership, Customer-centric Values, and Stakeholder Economics |
Building further from the Zara Fast Fashion case, you will apply two building blocks: Fringe Mapping [what needs to be done] and Scenario Planning [what can be done].
| 1: Fringe Mapping | Gain an understanding of the sector's micro and macro environments by considering: - Optimization: resources to be reduced and better managed - Sustaining: resources to be added and new strategies implemented - Breakthrough: resources and processes to be re-organized and used in new ways - Disruption: changing the values, culture and economics of the business |
| 2: Scenario Planning | - Create a scenario of what must be done - Create the plan to innovate |
Throughout the program, you have used innovation tools and honed strategic leadership competencies applied to Zara and Fast Fashion. At this point, you end your journey with your own Applied Innovation Toolkit.
Your Toolkit includes:
| The Tool | what you became proficient in using. |
| The Story | the context about why each tool is critical. |
| The Application | the guide on how best to use the tool. |
| The Exercise | the practice on using and applying the tool. |
Now the focus shifts to your own business experience, either the company in which you currently work, or past business experience. Armed with your Applied Innovation Toolkit it is up to you to innovate.
APPLIED INNOVATION IS A 21ST CENTURY LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE
Peter Drucker said ‘what you do different’ is a critical element of strategy. Where uncertainty is normative and context is everything in the 21st Century, businesses must embrace all facets of complexity [personal, contextual, interpersonal].
As professionals and practitioners, we must listen to our guts and act intuitively. The market demand is to be strategic in delivering value to customers. The personal demand is to develop robust decision-making competencies to engage successfully in globally competitive business eco-systems. In other words, we must be innovative.
We can learn about innovation, as well as about global competition, business eco-systems, and even leadership. We can do different things as practitioners, professionals, and planners. However, that is simply doing different things. Innovation is “doing things differently”. At heart, innovation is disruptive.
This Program in Applied Innovation will disrupt your everyday normalcies. Through it you will transform yourself into a 21st Century Strategic Leader with the capacity to embrace the challenges of change and innovation and capture the full human potential across the entire organization.
This program aims to jump start creative thinking, collaboration, commitment, and the kind of behaviour change that closes the gap between the theory and the practice of innovation. The goal is to activate the mind-set that enables you to become a proactive innovator and catalyst for a culture of innovation. It is about strategic thinking and strategic intent, not about better operations and processes.
Ultimately, it is about capacitating you as a contextual leader in the face of complexity, ambiguity, and risk. It calls for flexibility, agility and non-rational decision making.
Through this program, we position Supply Chain Logistics as the driver of innovation. Innovation is not a fancy way to solve complex problems. We expect all SCL professionals to solve problems, no matter how complex they are. Innovation builds contextual intelligence.
