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Strategic management is a set of managerial decisions and actions aimed at the generation of sustainable competitive advantage.

Overview

An organization’s strategy must be appropriate for its resources, environmental circumstances, and core objectives. The process involves matching the company's to the external business environment the organization faces. Strategy formulation involves:

• Doing a situation analysis: both internal and external; both micro-environmental and macro-environmental.
• Concurrent with this assessment, objectives are set. This involves crafting vision statements (long term view of a possible future), mission statements (the role that the organization gives itself in society), overall corporate objectives (both financial and strategic), strategic business unit objectives (both financial and strategic), and tactical objectives.
• These objectives should, in the light of the situation analysis, suggest a strategic plan. The plan provides the details of how to achieve these objectives.

This three-step strategy formulation process is sometimes referred to as determining where you are now, determining where you want to go, and then determining how to get there. These three questions are the essence of strategic planning. SWOT Analysis: I/O Economics for the external factors and RBV for the internal factors.

Strategy implementation involves:

• Allocation of sufficient resources (financial, personnel, time, technology support)
• Establishing a chain of command or some alternative structure (such as cross functional teams)
• Assigning responsibility of specific tasks or processes to specific individuals or groups
• It also involves managing the process. This includes monitoring results, comparing to benchmarks and best practices, evaluating the efficacy and efficiency of the process, controlling for variances, and making adjustments to the process as necessary.
• When implementing specific programs, this involves acquiring the requisite resources, developing the process, training, process testing, documentation, and integration with (and/or conversion from) legacy processes.

Strategy formulation and implementation is an on-going, never-ending, integrated process requiring continuous reassessment and reformation. Strategic management is dynamic; see Strategy dynamics. It involves a complex pattern of actions and reactions. It is partially planned and partially unplanned. Strategy is both planned and emergent, dynamic, and interactive. Some people (such as Andy Grove at Intel) feel that there are critical points at which a strategy must take a new direction in order to be in step with a changing business environment. These critical points of change are called strategic inflection points.

Time scales

Strategic management operates on several time scales. Short term strategies involve planning and managing for the present. Long term strategies involve preparing for and preempting the future. Marketing strategist Derek Abell (1993), has suggested that understanding this dual nature of strategic management is the least understood part of the process. He claims that balancing the temporal aspects of strategic planning requires the use of dual strategies simultaneously.

Strategic Management is actually a solid foundation or a framework within which all the functionning managerial operations are bundled together. This is the highest level corporate activity that sets the terms and goals for a company that it should follow for prosperity.

General approaches

In general terms, there are two main approaches to strategic management which are opposite but complement each other in some ways:

• 'The Industrial Organization Approach'
  • based on economic theory — deals with issues like competitive rivalry, resource allocation, economies of scale
  • assumptions — rationality, self discipline behaviour, profit maximization
• The Sociological Approach
  • deals primarily with human interactions
  • assumptions — bounded rationality, satisficing behaviour, profit sub-optimality. An example of a company that currently operates this way is Google

Strategic management techniques can be viewed as bottom-up, top-down, or collaborative processes. In the bottom-up approach, employees submit proposals to their managers who, in turn, funnel the best ideas further up the organization. This is often accomplished by a capital budgeting process. Proposals are assessed using financial criteria such as return on investment or cost-benefit analysis. The proposals that are approved form the substance of a new strategy, all of which is done without a grand strategic design or a strategic architect. The top-down approach is the most common by far. In it, the CEO, possibly with the assistance of a strategic planning team, decides on the overall direction the company should take. Some organizations are starting to experiment with collaborative strategic planning techniques that recognize the emergent nature of strategic decisions.

The strategy hierarchy

In most (large) corporations there are several levels of strategy. Strategic management is the highest in the sense that it is the broadest, applying to all parts of the firm. It gives direction to corporate values, corporate culture, corporate goals, and corporate missions. Under this broad corporate strategy there are often functional or business unit strategies.

Functional strategies include marketing strategies, new product development strategies, human resource strategies, financial strategies, legal strategies, and information technology management strategies. The emphasis is on short and medium term plans and is limited to the domain of each department's functional responsibility. Each functional department attempts to do its part in meeting overall corporate objectives, and hence to some extent their strategies are derived from broader corporate strategies.

Many companies feel that a functional organizational structure is not an efficient way to organize activities so they have reengineered according to processes or Strategic business units (SBUs). A strategic business unit is a semi-autonomous unit within an organization. It is usually responsible for its own budgeting, new product decisions, hiring decisions, and price setting. An SBU is treated as an internal profit centre by corporate headquarters. Each SBU is responsible for developing its business strategies, strategies that must be in tune with broader corporate strategies.

The "lowest" level of strategy is Operational strategy. It is very narrow in focus and deals with day-to-day operational activities such as scheduling criteria. It must operate within a budget but is not at liberty to adjust or create that budget. Operational strategy was encouraged by Peter Drucker in his theory of Management by objectives (MBO). Operational level strategies are informed by business level strategies which, in turn, are informed by corporate level strategies. Business strategy, which refers to the aggregated operational strategies of single business firm or that of an SBU in a diversified corporation refers to the way in which a firm competes in its chosen arenas.

Corporate strategy, then, refers to the overarching strategy of the diversified firm. Such corporate strategy answers the questions of "in which businesses should we compete?" and "how does being in one business add to the competitive advantage of another portfolio firm, as well as the competitive advantage of the corporation as a whole?"

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a tendency in some firms to revert to a simpler strategic structure. This is being driven by information technology. It is felt that knowledge management systems should be used to share information and create common goals. Strategic divisions are thought to hamper this process. Most recently, this notion of strategy has been captured under the rubric of dynamic strategy, popularized by the strategic management textbook authored by Carpenter and Sanders . This work builds on that of Brown and Eisenhart as well as Christensen and portrays firm strategy, both business and corporate, as necessarily embracing ongoing strategic change, and the seamless integration of strategy formulation and implementation. Such change and implementation are usually built into the strategy through the staging and pacing facets.

Reasons why strategic plans fail

There are many reasons why strategic plans fail, especially:

• Failure to understand the customer
  • Why do they buy
  • Is there a real need for the product
  • inadequate or incorrect marketing research
• Inability to predict environmental reaction
  • What will competitors do
    • Fighting brands
    • Price wars
  • Will government intervene
• Over-estimation of resource competence
  • Can the staff, equipment, and processes handle the new strategy
  • Failure to develop new employee and management skills
• Failure to coordinate
  • Reporting and control relationships not adequate
  • Organizational structure not flexible enough
• Failure to obtain senior management commitment
  • Failure to get management involved right from the start
  • Failure to obtain sufficient company resources to accomplish task
• Failure to obtain employee commitment
  • New strategy not well explained to employees
  • No incentives given to workers to embrace the new strategy
• Under-estimation of time requirements
  • No critical path analysis done
• Failure to follow the plan
  • No follow through after initial planning
  • No tracking of progress against plan
  • No consequences for above
• Failure to manage change
  • Inadequate understanding of the internal resistance to change
  • Lack of vision on the relationships between processes, technology and organization
• Poor communications
  • Insufficient information sharing among stakeholders
  • Exclusion of stakeholders and delegates
• Failure to focus
  • Inability or unwillingness to make choices which are true to the strategic mission (i.e. to do fewer things, better), leads to mediocrity, inability to compete

Unrealistic expectations The strategy made may be unrelated to the ability or resources of the organisation.

Criticisms of strategic management

Although a sense of direction is important, it can also stifle creativity, especially if it is rigidly enforced. In an uncertain and ambiguous world, fluidity can be more important than a finely tuned strategic compass. When a strategy becomes internalized into a corporate culture, it can lead to group think. It can also cause an organization to define itself too narrowly. An example of this is marketing myopia.

Most theories of strategic management seem to have a lifespan less than that of the popularity of the latest teen music idol. Many critics claim that this is because most of them generally do not work. Keep in mind that this article describes only the 50 or so most successful theories, thus exhibiting survivorship bias (ironically, itself an area of research in strategic management). For every theory that gets incorporated into strategic management textbooks there are many that are quickly forgotten. Many theories tend either to be too narrow in focus to build a complete corporate strategy on, or too general and abstract to be applicable to specific situations. The low success rate is further fueled by the management lecture circuit in which hundreds of self-appointed gurus, many without serious academic credentials or substantial expertise, attempt to sell books and explain their “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking” theories to audiences of business executives for a sizable fee. While there are undoubtedly inspirational ideas contained in these seminars, the theories expounded therein have not, for the most part, been subjected to serious study. (See business philosophies and popular management theories and management fads for a more critical view of management theories.)

Some critics take the opposite approach claiming effectively that there are not enough theories, and when they arrive they are too late to help managers make any important decisions. These commentators remind us that the basic, everyday purpose of strategic management is to match a company's strategy with the business environment that the organization is in. Because the environment is constantly changing, effective strategic management requires a continuous flow of new theories suitable for the new circumstances. The problem with most theories is that they solve yesterday’s problems, similar to a business Maginot Line. Various approaches to solve this problem have emerged, however, including Mintzberg's ideas of 'emergent strategies' and use of ideas from complexity theory in what is often called complexity strategy.

Gary Hamel (2000) coined the term strategic convergence to explain the limited scope of the strategies being used by rivals in greatly differing circumstances. He lamented that strategies converge more than they should, because the more successful ones get imitated by firms that do not understand that the strategic process involves designing a custom strategy for the specifics of each situation.

Journals devoted primarily to strategic management

• Strategic Management Journal
• Harvard Business Review
• The Journal of Business Strategy
• Long Range Planning – house journal of the Strategic Planning Society
• Strategy and Leadership

Magazines that frequently contain strategic management articles

• Fast Company
• Forbes
• The Economist
• The Wall Street Journal
• Harvard Business Review
• Strategic Management Journal
• Academy of Management Journal
• Strategy – house magazine of the Strategic Planning Society

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See also

• Management by objectives
• Middle management
• Predictive analytics
• Strategy as Simple Rules
• Thought leadership

External links

• Strategic Management Self-Study Modules (California State University, Chico)
• Strategic Decision Support using Computerised Morphological Analysis From the Swedish Morphological Society
• Strategic Assets - using corporate resources for competitive advantage

Professional Associations

• The Association of Internal Management Consultants - The nationwide network of Strategic Management and Planning professionals

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• Articles lacking sources from August 2006
• Anticipatory thinking
• Strategic management
• Management
• Business terms