An employee of a chemical company, Ariola, was concerned about some harmful carbon emissions, and increased carbon footprints which had been overlooked by environmentalists and political groups or the statutory bodies involved in environmental protection. Since the company was not receptive to new ideas, the employee devised an air filter to prevent those harmful emissions. But he faced a stiff resistance from his unit manager and hence had to approach the managing director of Ariola. The managing director, though not averse to the idea of placing the air filters at the point of the gas emissions, could not take the decision solely. A meeting of the heads of the three operating units was called: the research head, the unit manager under whom the employee was working, the chief of infrastructure and resources, and the marketing and finance head. The polling mechanism was used to get the approval of the majority of this proposal to consider it final from a strategic perspective. From the organization’s cultural perspective, it is required that an employee at the lowest level proceeds through a structured process in order to get their idea approved and sanctioned due to the absence of the needed authority. However, the employee’s situation was such that when he approached the unit heads, they wanted their heads to shoulder the responsibility of validating the proposal, pushing it to the managing director of the organization.
From the political perspective, a stakeholder mapping was done with respect to the stakeholders who would be interested, and the positional power was taken into account to set the ball rolling. So, taking into consideration the government regulations that require the pollution levels to be under control along with the company’s strategic innovative initiative to be brought into focus, it was decided that the following strategic measures were to be taken:
• Rally support that would result in a coalition, creating momentum that would work its way up the corporate ladder to get the proposal accepted.
• Employee and his support group approaching unit heads to gain support.
• Wait for the time that is right to initiate the push of that proposal based on internal and external business conditions and proposing to external stakeholders for relevant funds and grants to run the pilot.

Question
1. What according to the reader is the inference derived from the case above?
2. Strategy formulation and strategy implementation revolved around a set of rules. Throw light on the same.