Strategic Leadership Lecture 3

This week case study is about the National Health Service (NHS),the name  is used to refer to the four public health services of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, individually or collectively, though only England's NHS officially has this title.  It is one of the biggest employers in the UK.

Regarding to the issues discussed with my colleagues on NHS, I believe that the key problem was the organisatioanl structure.   An important component to the success of any organisation is the type of structure it implements. Organisational structure determines the number of layers of management and how departments interact with one another. In NHS, it was not cleared who was leading the organisation, and therefore there was not a chain of command. As the result of that, a poor organizational structure in NHS has created a variety of problems such as bloated management, poor communication and so on.

In addition, when the Carrefour case study is compared with the NHS one, it can be seen that there are certain similarities and differentiates.  Primarily, in terms of differentiation the two businesses do not operate in the same commercial environment. For instance, one is a public limited company in care service and the other one is private limited company in retailing. Hence, one could argue that different organizational structures and strategies are required for each circumstance. However, a person number 2 may well argue that successful leaders have similar characteristics and thus they have the same reaction to the situation.  The similarity of these two leaders is, they are not effective at all.

In conclusion from this week class, I picked up the first art of effective strategic leadership. Bridging, which will be one of my three key lessons and it will be strategy 1.

(A student DJ).