Strategic Thinking

We live in the new era of rapid change and uncertainty. There is no sense in building detailed long term strategies in the world where unexpected change is a rule and nobody can foresee the future. And when we speak about strategy we do not regard it to planning but rather to thinking.

Strategic planning is an oxymoron. Strategic thinking does not lead to a plan, it leads to a strategy. Rather, planning must follow strategy. If you don't want to call it operational planning, call it "Planning that Follows Strategy."

The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, by Henry Mintzberg

Strategic thinking uncovers potential opportunities for creating value and challenges assumptions about a company's value proposition, so that when the plan is created, it targets these opportunities.

One of the main aspects of strategic thinking is the possibility to create vision of the future, the art of predicting. But this prediction is based not on pure opportunity but on critical analysis of received information. A manager is a good strategist when he can find relevant sources of information, can analyse them and make conclusions/projections for the future.

Other important aspects of strategic thinking are competences and skills of each member of the team. Working in the group we have found the strengths of each member of the team which is really unique that helped us to create a competitive advantage by increasing the number and quality of ideas and originality of expression in creative problem solving.

Random selection of group member could be appraised as succeed. All group members represent different businesses and different function in a company. Involved in consultancy business, Vladimir can generalize a problem and structure our strategic analysis. Oleg can bring a financial expertise. Lilia can add some specific view from financial reporting data and HR perspective. Victoria has strong analytical and research skills, which help us to go through great volumes of information in order to find relevant sources. Olga has organisation skills inspiring the whole team for creativity.

All group members are strong personalities with big managerial background. According to Hofstede cultural dimensions approach the degree of individualism in the group is very high. Working for foreign companies our team got accustomed to less power distance as it is normal by typical Russian organizations, this helps to fulfil the common tasks. To avoid conflicts we practice a democracy within the group, constructive relationships and positive attitudes.

The group is united around a common goal. The cooperative relationship provides a context to consider and appreciate other group members' ideas instead of ignoring (individualistic approach) or trying to come up with a better one (competition).

The process of identifying the Sukhoi's strategy was based on the sharing between members their conclusions after the initial process of collecting and analyzing available information and prepared according to personal competences of each team member.

Mutual sharing of the critical insights during the group activities and discussion let the group members determine the company's strategy and follow the strategy analysis even facing the challenge of the lack of Sukhoi's internal information and basing mostly on the media sources of information.

The limitation for the team performance might be caused not by the lack of trust or knowledge, but by the strong leadership qualities of each manager-team member and the different motivation for the group activity result. Furthermore, the understanding