Leading Strategicially Business & Marketing Research Paper

Leading Strategically
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Executive Summary
This report focuses on the umbrella topic of leading strategically. Within the report are sections that help to shed light on the topic further.
First, the report addresses the values, traits, and abilities relevant to a great CEO. Here, the report considers the visionary abilities of a CEO, communication skills, the decisiveness of a leader, and the adaptive capabilities of a leader.
The next section discusses the importance of sustainability and resilience in an organization. The report indicates that both are crucial for the continuity of an organization.
In the next section, the report discusses Elon Musk as a CEO. Here, the traits that make Elon Musk special as a CEO are discussed as well as his wittiness.
The report then discusses the barriers to effective leadership. Factors like expectations, information flow, the inability to manage relationships, and character flaws are discussed here as some of the challenges that CEOs face in their capacity as leaders.
The theory applicable to my situation at work is then discussed, with the contingency theory being the theory of focus. This theory posits that there is no single way to lead or one approach to leadership.
Finally, the report discusses an instance of leadership where I have demonstrated leadership. The scenario is presented with all the facts, as well as how I demonstrated leadership by controlling a crowd whose aggression was about to
Leading Strategically
Important values, traits, and abilities for great CEOs
Visionary
A CEO is in charge of setting the course of the company. He/she should inform and steer the company to achieve its vision and strategic goals. This requires vision, and many companies are made or broken by their CEO’s vision. Historically, many CEOs whose vision set their companies on a course to become great companies and others who lacked vision and led their companies on a downward spiral. For example, a company like Nokia was one of the first companies in the mobile phone industry. However, because of lack of innovation, the company lost its first movers’ advantage, and today, it controls a negligible share of the smartphone industry. On the other hand, Steve Jobs, when he headed apple, his vision is still the core products produced by the company over ten years since he left the company.
Strong communication skills
A CEO needs to communicate effectively. He/she needs to compellingly communicate his/her vision clearly to the employees. He is also supposed to inspire, motivate and lead them to achieve success. Each of these tasks requires strong communication skills. Additionally, CEOs also represent their companies in many places. They also chair many meetings, and most of their work revolves around communication to understand how to achieve the company objectives. All these activities require the CEO to have strong communication skills. Proper communication from the top management also trickles down the organization and sets the tone of the company and how other employees work to communicate with each other. A CEO who has poor communication skills is always at the risk of being misunderstood and his/her words misconstrued. It matters not his vision or other attributes, but if a CEO is a poor communicator, he/she is likely to struggle to meet his/her objectives. Thus, to rally a team behind the CEO, he/she must find ways to communicate effectively.
Decisive
As the leader of a company, the work of a CEO is mainly to make big decisions. Most of the decisions have uncertainties, but they must be addressed. High-performing CEOs understand that a wrong decision is often better than no decision at all CITATION Ele17 \l 1033 (Botelho, Powell, Kincaid, & Wang, 2017). As the person who is at the helm of the company, he/she has to take risks and seize opportunities that come his/her way. When a CEO is indecisive, he sets a bad precedence and stalls the development of the company. Nearly a third of CEO are fired for being indecisive CITATION Ele17 \l 1033 (Botelho, Powell, Kincaid, & Wang, 2017). A good CEO takes into account all the information available and has to make a decision. CEOs have to take calculated risks because failure is always heaped on him/her. This is the most defining element of CEOs and separates between incompetent, good, and great CEOs.
Adaptive
Being a great CEO requires you to realize when you make wrong decisions and change and encounter unfamiliar issues, and you change course to accommodate new eventualities. It is nearly impossible to stay on the job and never make wrong calls. However, revisiting the wrong call and adapting to avoid further damage is as important as making any other important decision. In their line of work, each CEO will make wrong decisions or make wrong calls that have adverse effects on the company. It is important that the CEO understands his/her mistake, learn from it and change course to lead the company in the right direction.
Why Resilience and Sustainability Important
Resilience is the business’ ability to rapidly adapt to unforeseen circumstances and respond effectively. Resilience is important because it ensures that the company remains at least operational even when it encounters significantly big challenges. The company’s resilience guarantees continued operations as the challenges are being addressed. Secondly, resilience builds strength and identifies weaknesses inherent in the business. Resilience is proactive, and hence in preparing for resilience, the business ends up sealing many loopholes and building capacity. For example, in creating a business continuity plan, the company would invest in creating backups and continuity plans. While these are resilience measures, the business benefits by having an alternate system that can guarantee the continuity of the business in case of any eventuality. Creating the continuity plan can compel the business to invest in new systems, i.e., cloud computing.
Sustainability is the management and coordination of environmental, social, and financial demands to ensure responsible, ethical and ongoing success CITATION Nat191 \l 1033 (Chladek, 2019). Sustainability is key to any business for a few reasons. First, sustainability is important because it ensures the business uses its resources efficiently and responsibly. The business benefits from the long term utility of the resource, and the environment is not degraded in the process of exploiting the resource. Additionally, running a business sustainably builds its reputation and helps in marketing its products. Companies with links to unsustainable operations have bad brand images. It is primarily one reason why many companies today have allocated resources for corporate social responsibilities to build a sustainable ecosystem that strengthens their brand image and helps them continue exploiting the available resources for a longer period.
Secondly, sustainability helps strengthen the business with the community. Efforts to achieve sustainability are usually designed with cooperation with the community. New products are born to meet sustainability goals, and in some cases, they go to dominate the market. Consumers are increasingly becoming aware of the business practices of the products they consume, and they are increasingly choosing companies that are sustainable over the other ones CITATION Rem20 \l 1033 (Rosmarin, 2020).
An Example of a CEO who has the Afore-listed Values, Traits, and Abilities
Elon Musk is one of the most influential persons of the 21st century. He is the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, the Boring Company, OpenAI, and Neuralink. Tesla is a publicly-traded company with a market cap of nearly $850 billion. The rest of the companies are unicorns. All of these companies have only known one CEO, Elon Musk.
Musk is visionary. In each of the aforementioned companies, Musk founded them on revolutionary ideas and steered them to their current form. Each of these companies has disrupted their respective industries under the stewardship of Elon Musk. Tesla has become the most valued electric car manufacturer and has forced the industry to focus on phasing out ice engines and creating autonomous electric cars. Tesla motor vehicles remain the best electric cars in the industry. SpaceX has become the first private company to take astronauts to the ISS. The company has long-term contracts with governments to launch their satellites to space, among other objectives. There are many more examples of how Musk’s has translated his visions to reality and built great companies.
Elon Musk has strong communication skills. There are several memos and emails that have been leaked to the press that show how Musk takes good communication seriously. In one email to his staff in Tesla, Elon Musk noted, ‘there is a creeping tendency to use made-up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made-up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication’ CITATION Jac18 \l 1033 (Rear, 2018). He went on to note that it...