Designing High-leverage Strategies and Tactics

Past-cast Series — Seeing relevance in earlier publications

Georgantzas, Nicholas, and James Ritchie-Dunham. 2003. Designing High-Leverage Strategies and Tactics, Human Systems Management, 22(1), 1-11.

Shingo’s breakthrough improves the way strategy researchers and managers talk about and design high-leverage strategies and tactics. Seeing production as a concatenated net of operations and processes not only negates the dysfunctional effects of Anthony’s paradigm, but also leads to a framework for strategic management (SM) as a well-specified net of strategies and tactics that deliver direct, dynamic and structural leverage. Anchored in system dynamics, systemic leverage (SL) analysis and synthesis can help managers align multiple, system goal aiming tactics that mix pure action with communication in corporate-, business- and functional-level strategy. The insight gained from SM’s net view with SL analysis brings modern management a step closer to the tradeoffs-free synthesis to direct managerial attention to the combined effects of direct, dynamic and structural leverage in strategy making.