In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates.A corporation-oriented view Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies, and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans.A Simple Approach to Strategic Management A_Simple_Approach_to_Strategic_Management A Simple Approach to Strategic Management Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex organizational environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.(Lamb, 1984:ix)Lamb, Robert, Boyden Competitive strategic management, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984
Michael Porter identifies three principles underlying strategy:
Creating a "unique and valuable [market] position". Making trade-offs by choosing "what not to do". Creating "fit" by aligning company activities with one another to support the chosen strategy.
Corporate strategy involves answering a key question from a portfolio perspective: "What business should we be in?" Business strategy involves answering the question: "How shall we compete in this business?" Alternatively, corporate strategy may be thought of as the strategic management of a corporation (a particular legal structure of a business), and business strategy as the strategic management of a business.
Management theory and practice often make a distinction between strategic management and operational management, where operational management is concerned primarily with improving efficiency and controlling costs within the boundaries set by the organization's strategy.
Definitions
Michael Porter defined strategy in 1980 as the "...broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry out those goals" and the "...combination of the ends (goals) for which the firm is striving and the means (policies) by which it is seeking to get there." He continued that "The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment."
However, in 1988, Henry Mintzberg described the many different definitions and perspectives on strategy reflected in both academic research and in practice.Mintzberg, H., "Crafting Strategy", Harvard Business Review, July/August 1987.Mintzberg, Henry and Quinn, J.B., The Strategy Process, Prentice-Hall, Harlow, 1988. He examined the strategic process and concluded it was much more fluid and unpredictable than people had thought. Because of this, he could not point to one process that could be called strategic planning. Instead Mintzberg concluded that there are five types of strategies: Strategy as plan – a directed course of action to achieve an intended set of goals; similar to the strategic planning concept; Strategy as pattern – a consistent pattern of past behavior, with a strategy realized over time rather than planned or intended. Where the realized pattern was different from the intent, he referred to the strategy as emergent; Strategy as position – locating brands, products, or companies within the market, based on the conceptual framework of consumers or other stakeholders; a strategy determined primarily by factors outside the firm; Strategy as ploy – a specific maneuver intended to outwit a competitor; and Strategy as perspective – executing strategy based on a "theory of the business" or natural extension of the mindset or ideological perspective of the organization.
In 1998, Mintzberg developed these five types of management strategy into 10 "schools of thought" and grouped them into three categories. The first group is normative. It consists of the schools of informal design and conception, the formal planning, and analytical positioning. The second group, consisting of six schools, is more concerned with how strategic management is actually done, rather than prescribing optimal plans or positions. The six schools are entrepreneurial, visionary, cognitive, learning/adaptive/emergent, negotiation, corporate culture and business environment. The third and final group consists of one school, the configuration or transformation school, a hybrid of the other schools organized into stages, organizational life cycles, or "episodes".Mintzberg, H. Ahlstrand, B. and Lampel, J., Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management, The Free Press, New York, 1998.
Some complexity theorists define strategy as the unfolding of the internal and external aspects of the organization that results in actions in a socio-economic context.
Michael D. Watkins (2007) argued that strategic management operates as a critical bridge between an organization's mission, vision, and execution. He asserted that if the mission statement and goals answer the 'what' question, and if the vision statement answers the 'why' questions, then strategy provides answers to the 'how' question of business management. In other words, strategy encompasses the methods, frameworks, and decision-making processes that enable a company to translate its aspirations into concrete actions and competitive success.
Application
Strategy is defined as "the determination of the basic long-term goals of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals".Chandler, Alfred, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the history of industrial enterprise, Doubleday, New York, 1962. Strategies are established to set direction, focus effort, define or clarify the organization, and provide consistency or guidance in response to the environment.
Strategic management involves the related concepts of strategic planning and strategic thinking. Strategic planning is analytical in nature and refers to formalized procedures to produce the data and analyses used as inputs for strategic thinking, which synthesizes the data resulting in the strategy. Strategic planning may also refer to control mechanisms used to implement the strategy once it is determined. In other words, strategic planning happens around the strategic thinking or strategy making activity.
Strategic management is often described as involving two major processes: formulation and implementation of strategy. While described sequentially below, in practice the two processes are iterative and each provides input for the other.
Formulation Formulation of strategy involves analyzing the environment in which the organization operates, then making a series of strategic decisions about how the organization will fulfill its mission. Formulation ends with a series of goals or objectives and measures for the organization to pursue. Environmental analysis includes the: Remote external environment, including the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental landscape (PESTLE); Industry environment, such as the competitive behavior of rival organizations, the bargaining power of buyers/customers and suppliers, threats from new entrants to the industry, and the ability of buyers to substitute products (Porter's 5 forces); and Internal environment, regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the organization's resources (i.e., its people, processes and IT systems).
Strategic decisions are based on insight from the environmental assessment and are responses to strategic questions about how the organization will compete, such as: What is the organization's business? Who is the target customer for the organization's products and services? Where are the customers and how do they buy? What is considered "value" to the customer? Which businesses, products and services should be included or excluded from the portfolio of offerings? What is the geographic scope of the business? What differentiates the company from its competitors in the eyes of customers and other stakeholders? Which resources, skills and capabilities should be developed within the firm? What are the important opportunities and risks for the organization? How can the firm grow, through both its base business and new business? How can the firm generate more value for investors?
The answers to these and many other strategic questions result in the organization's strategy and a series of specific short-term and long-term goals or objectives and related measures.
Implementation The second major process of strategic management is implementation, which involves decisions regarding how the organization's resources (i.e., people, process and IT systems) will be aligned and mobilized towards the objectives. Implementation results in how the organization's resources are structured (such as by product or service or geography), leadership arrangements, communication, incentives, and monitoring mechanisms to track progress towards objectives, among others.
Running the day-to-day operations of the business is often referred to as "operations management" or specific terms for key departments or functions, such as "logistics management" or "marketing management", which take over once strategic management decisions are implemented.
Historical development
Origins The strategic management discipline originated in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the numerous early contributors, the most influential were Peter Drucker, Philip Selznick, Alfred Chandler, Igor Ansoff, and Bruce Henderson. The discipline draws from earlier thinking and texts on 'strategy' dating back thousands of years. Prior to 1960, the term "strategy" was primarily used regarding war and politics, not business. Many companies built strategic planning functions to develop and execute the formulation and implementation processes during the 1960s.Henry Mintzberg-The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning-Harvard Business Review-January 1994
Peter Drucker was a prolific management theorist and author of dozens of management books, with a career spanning five decades. He addressed fundamental strategic questions in a 1954 book The Practice of Management writing: "... the first responsibility of top management is to ask the question 'what is our business?' and to make sure it is carefully studied and correctly answered." He wrote that the answer was determined by the customer. He recommended eight areas where objectives should be set, such as market standing, innovation, productivity, physical and financial resources, worker performance and attitude, profitability, manager performance and development, and public responsibility.Drucker, Peter The Practice of Management, Harper and Row, New York, 1954.
In 1957, Philip Selznick initially used the term "distinctive competence" in referring to how the Navy was attempting to differentiate itself from the other services. He also formalized the idea of matching the organization's internal factors with external environmental circumstances.Selznick, Philip Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, Row, Peterson, Evanston Il. 1957. This core idea was developed further by Kenneth R. Andrews in 1963 into what we now call SWOT analysis, in which the strengths and weaknesses of the firm are assessed in light of the opportunities and threats in the business environment.