Essendon Food Solutions Strategic Leadership

This assignment provides an in-depth examination of Essendon Food Solutions' strategic leadership. It highlights the need for a democratic style of leadership to facilitate easy communication within the company and encourages free flow of ideas among employees. The importance of adopting latest technology for disruptive innovation is also emphasized, along with the necessity of developing strategic competencies in employees from a young age.

Dynamic Strategy
and Disruptive
Innovation.

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
The EFS company holds the capacity to innovate from various perspectives like .....................3
Strategic leadership......................................................................................................................4
Recommendation ........................................................................................................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................6

INTRODUCTION
Essendon food solutions is an Australian company founded by Jonathan Jacob and Henry
Shultz nearly forty years ago. Also, the EFS has two subsidiaries namely Enzymen Tech and
Essendon Emulsifiers. The company follows autocratic organizational structure where all the
decisions are taken by the General Managers and senior executives without participation of
employees. The current report will focus on the disruptive innovation from various perspectives
like internal, external, marketing and technology and also emphasize on the role of strategic
leadership and the ways to improve the performance of EFS company.
MAIN BODY
Disruptive innovation is a marketing strategy that involves the evolution of a product/service
which means that initially the newly launched product takes root in simple applications at the
bottom of the market by being less expensive and easily available but after some time the
product grows significantly and eventually overcomes its existing competitors (Christensen and
et.al., 2015).
The EFS company holds the capacity to innovate from various perspectives like
Internal perspective: The internal perspective of EFS organization involves applying
innovation into the field of internal practices of business like management styles, communication
and allocation of tasks and responsibility.
 Human resources: There are various issues relating to the human resource of the
company. The major problem is concerned with the restricted growth prospects of young
employees because the top-level management includes all the senior and old people
which in a way avoids the scope for innovation in the organization. Therefore, it is
recommended that employees must be promoted on the basis of their talent and skills and
not on the basis of seniority or age. It is also suggested that the human resource
department recruit all kind of employees having knowledge of both theoretical and
practical aspects.
External perspective:
 Regulatory and economic conditions: The company must follow various regulatory and
legal standards if they wish to operate freely without any government intervention (King
and Baatartogtokh, 2015). The food solutions must be checked and approved by the

government bodies as this would encourage disruptive innovation within the employees
of EFS company. The disruptive innovation must comply with the regulations otherwise
its purpose would be defeated.
Marketing perspective:
 Customer visit programs: Customer visit programs are important as it helps the
company in identifying the actual problems faced by consumers and the potential solution
for it. Thus, the company can use disruptive innovation to develop unique product which
can help in increasing their market share and build a brand image for the organization
(Langley and et.al., 2017).
 Empathic designs: It is recommended to use empathic designs so that it does not change
the image of the company in front of their customers.
Technology perspective: Technological perspective is basically concerned with the use of
innovative technology that displaces the existing technology and creates a new product or service
which increases the market share and profits of the company. Research and development is very
important for Essendon food solutions therefore the company aims towards the use of latest and
modern technology in order to continuously innovate and create something new for the
customers (Bock, 2015). The technological perspective examines the use of technology that
further actively contributes towards disruptive innovation. It is very difficult to identify
disruptive technology because the technology used in EFS is based on scientific discoveries
hence it required a lot of expenditure in the research and development to develop a suitable
disruptive technology.
Strategic leadership
The strategic leaders of EFS are Jonathan Jacob and Henry Shultz and they have the
potential to detect the market opportunities of an idea and then develop product accordingly.
Both the leaders possess skills which help them is disruptive innovation. Core strength of both
leaders is cognitive ability and extraversion. However, Jonathan Jacob and Henry Shultz need to
have work experience which states the collection of different roles and responsibilities
throughout their career. These responsibilities include managing, leading activities and many
more. Such kind of things will improve their skills.

Analysis
Varied problems exist in the firm related to leadership styles in the EFS because it ranks its
employees on the basis of their age rather than knowledge and skills and their position remains
fixed which further creates problem because it avoids the entry of talented employees who can
bring innovation and creativity into the overall operations of the company.
Recommendation
 It is imperative for EFS to provide equal opportunities to all the employees, and they
must be assigned leadership and the position in top-level management on the basis of
their knowledge and skills and not according to the age (Covin and Slevin, 2017).
 EFS needs to adopt democratic style of leadership instead of autocratic as it would help
in easy communication within the company where the leader can provide order and
authority to the workforce and further the employees can pass information related to
customer feedback, suggestions and can also share their grievance and problems. This
would encourage free flow of ideas and also increase the motivation of employees which
would further lead to improved productivity of all the employees while accomplishing the
goals and objectives.
 The strategic leadership must be done through selecting a leader from the young
employees as they have the capability to bring disruptive innovation and motivate the
employees to work harder and adopt the changes effectively. Also, the organisation need
to develop strategic competencies and leadership skills within the employees from a very
young age. A strategic leader must have the potential to detect market opportunities,
formulate a vision and work accordingly for the success of the organisation.
CONCLUSION
From the above file it can be concluded that both disruptive innovation and strategic
leadership are important for any organization's success and manufacturing companies like
Essendon food solutions must adopt the latest technology in order to achieve the objective of
disruptive innovation which would help them in maximizing their profitability. Moreover, the
company must also adopt strategic leadership so that the goals can be achieved with maximum
productivity and on time.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Bock, T., 2015. The future of construction automation: Technological disruption and the
upcoming ubiquity of robotics. Automation in Construction, 59, pp.113-121.
Christensen and et.al., 2015. What is disruptive innovation. Harvard Business Review, 93(12),
pp.44-53.
Covin, J.G. and Slevin, D.P., 2017. The entrepreneurial imperatives of strategic
leadership. Strategic entrepreneurship: Creating a new mindset, pp.307-327.
King, A.A. and Baatartogtokh, B., 2015. How useful is the theory of disruptive innovation?. MIT
Sloan Management Review, 57(1), p.77.
Langley and et.al., 2017. Interpersonal Dynamics in Strategic Leadership: Five Perspectives.
In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 10734). Briarcliff
Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Online
Disruptive innovation definition. 2019 [Online]. Available through:
<https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/disruptive-innovation>