Question

There are seven Criteria for Performance Excellence associated with this award. As a student School of Business, which three would you rank as most important as they relate to strategic marketing focus, goals, and objectives? Defend your choices.

1. Leadership: How upper management leads the organization, and how the organization leads within the community.
2. Strategy: How the organization establishes and plans to implement strategic directions.
3. Customers: How the organization builds and maintains strong, lasting relationships with customers.
4. Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management: How the organization uses data to support key processes and manage performance.
5. Workforce: How the organization empowers and involves its workforce.
6. Operations: How the organization designs, manages and improves key processes.
7. Results: How the organization performs in terms of customer satisfaction, finances, human resources, supplier and partner performance, operations, governance and social responsibility, and how the organization compares to its competitors.

Answer 1

According to me, the three most important criteria are as follows:

1. Workforce: The workforce drives the organization. Hence, it is imperative for an organization to keenly engage with its human capital and invest in their learning and development. From a strategic point of view, empowering the workforce with adequate skills is important to keep them at pace with the changing times.

2. Leadership: A leader does the goal setting and sets organizational objectives at a macro level. The engagement of the leadership with the community at large impacts business. Leadership is the skill of leading a group of people and inspiring them towards a particular direction. Vision, inspiration, oratory skills, honesty and integrity are the important traits that a leader must possess. A leader’s influence is built on trust. The leaders proactively formulate principles and guidelines.

For example, Barack Obama, the first black President of the U.S. displayed a peculiar leadership style which made him a favorite amongst the U.S. citizens. Barack Obama was the 44th President of U.S. and he displayed a transformative leadership style. His improbable and zenith rise speaks volumes about his effective leadership. Despite facing the prejudice of race and discrimination, he could rise to the highest and the most powerful office in the world.

3. Strategy: Certain policy decisions and strategic decisions need to be made for long term business resilience. For business resilience, 4 key points shall be kept in mind: Risk management, incident management, crisis management and business continuity management.

• Business level strategy: There are five business level strategies: cost leadership, focused low cost, differentiation, integrated low cost, focused differentiation. These strategies help the company gain a competitive advantage.
• Corporate level strategy: It defines what business does the company compete in and in which markets. Three types of corporate strategies are growth, stability and renewal.