Six-week online programme designed and led by strategy and organisational alignment expert Dr Jonathan Trevor
As businesses across the world fight to survive in unprecedented conditions, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford has launched a new online programme that will help participants analyse and align the individual elements of their organisations towards a long-term purpose.
The Oxford Strategic Alignment Programme was designed by Dr Jonathan Trevor, Associate Professor at Oxford Saïd, and draws on his extensive research into strategy and organisational alignment. Dr Trevor also leads teaching on the programme, with guest speakers including Tanushree Gupta, Digital Transformation Practice Lead, Google EMEA and Simon Meredith, CTO at IBM Europe.
‘The disruption stemming from the COVID-19 global pandemic presents leaders of established businesses with a rare opportunity to change the fundamentals of their organisation for the better, in ways that would not be possible or palatable in “normal times,” said Dr Trevor.
Strategic alignment is where all elements of a business – including its market strategy and how it is organised – are arranged (and rearranged) in such a way as to best support the fulfilment of its purpose. These elements form an enterprise value chain, which is only as strong as its weakest link.
In his book, Align: A Leadership Blueprint for Aligning Enterprise Purpose Strategy and Organization (Bloomsbury, 2019), Trevor explains why the best-aligned enterprises are the best performing and advises leaders to adopt a strategic approach to the alignment of their organisation over the short and long-term. Participants will explore lessons from the book in detail during the six-week programme.
The programme’s benefits are not limited to senior leaders – the content is designed to be applicable to executives, heads of department, consultants, and HR professionals.
‘Some organisations will always emerge from severe disruption stronger than others; stronger even than they were previously,’ said Dr Trevor. ‘It will be because their leaders, when facing disruption, imaginatively and courageously envisioned how to realign their organisation to thrive in the future and embraced the opportunity for positive change.
‘My hope for participants of this programme is that they develop the confidence and ability to be the positive change agent in their enterprise, wherever that may be.’
Align: A Leadership Blueprint for Aligning Enterprise Purpose Strategy and Organization was shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 and was Financial Times’ business book of the month, November 2019.
The Oxford Strategic Alignment Programme begins on 28 October and runs for six weeks. It is part of a wave of online programmes created by Oxford Saïd, which have seen over 16,500 participants from 167 countries since the launch of the Oxford Fintech Programme in 2017.
Registrations for the Oxford Strategic Alignment Programme will be accepted until 2 November.