Strategy and Performance Excellence Vocabulary

Flashcards for review of strategy and performance excellence.

Strategy

The pattern of decisions that determines and reveals a company’s goals, policies, and plans to meet the needs of its stakeholders.

Strategic Planning

The process of envisioning the organization’s future and developing the necessary goals, objectives, and action plans to achieve that future.

Mission

A firm's reason for existence; it answers the question “Why are we in business?”

Vision

Describes where the organization is headed and what it intends to be; it is a statement of the future that would not happen by itself.

Values (Guiding Principles)

Guide the journey to a vision by defining attitudes and policies for all employees, which are reinforced through conscious and subconscious behavior.

SWOT Analysis

An assessment of an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strategic Challenges

Pressures that exert a decisive influence on an organization’s likelihood of future success, often driven by competitive position.

Strategies

Broad statements that set the direction for the organization to take in realizing its mission and vision.

Strategic Objectives

What an organization must change or improve to remain or become competitive.

Action Plans

Things that an organization must do to achieve its strategic objectives.

Strategy Deployment

Developing detailed action plans, defining resource requirements and performance measures, and aligning work unit, supplier, and partner plans with overall strategic objectives.

Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment)

Emphasizes organization-wide planning and setting of priorities, providing resources to meet objectives, and measuring performance as a basis for improving it; a total quality approach to executing a strategy.

Work Systems

How the work of an organization is accomplished, involving the workforce, key suppliers and partners, contractors, collaborators, and other components of the supply chain.

Core Competencies

An organization’s areas of greatest expertise that provide a sustainable competitive advantage.

Outsourcing

The practice of transferring the operations of a business function to an outside supplier.

Vertical Integration

Business functions are acquired and consolidated within a firm.