Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Concept of Strategic Management

Strategic management is a comprehensive area that covers almost all the functional areas of the organization. It is an umbrella concept of management that comprises all such functional areas as marketing, finance & account,human resource, and production & operation into a top level management discipline. Therefore, strategic management has an importance in the organizational success and failure than any specific functional areas.

Strategic management is different than the routine and operation management. Strategic management deals with organizational level and top level issues whereas functional or operational level management deals with
the specific areas of the business. Strategic management has relatively longterm focus in comparison to the operational management. Top-level managers such as Chairman, Managing Director, and corporate level planners involve more in strategic management process whereas functional managers and other employees involve more in operational management areas. Strategic management area is broader than any specific functional management area.Strategic management relates to setting vision, mission, objectives, and strategies that can be the guideline to design functional strategies in other functional areas. Therefore, it is top-level management that paves the way for other functional or operational management in an organization.


Strategic management is very important area. It determines whether an organization excels, survives, or dies. Strategic management is very important because it guides all the functional areas of the business. It is generally
believed that businesses, which develop formal strategic management systems, have a higher probability of success than those, which do not. Strategic management helps firms anticipate future problems and
opportunities. It provides clear vision, mission, objectives, and strategies that lead organization into the secured future.

"Strategic management is defined as the art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that enable the organization to achieve its objectives." Generally, strategic management is
not only related to a single specialization but covers cross-functional or overall organization.

Strategic management is a stream of decisions and actions. It is a process by which top-level management decides and does for the success of the organization. It helps to determine the best possible strategy so that
organization could win the game in competitive business environment. Thus, strategic management is a way where a strategist finds where organization is and where it wants to reach. The gap between desired and possible is known as performance gap. In this context, strategic management process not only identifies the performance gap but also attempts to reduce the gap.

Sometimes, the performance gap can be positive, too. In such case a strategist uplifts his or her goal and minimizes the gap. Strategist tries to repair the system and strategy to reach at the targeted goal to fulfill the performance gap in case of negative gap.


Below are concepts to help expand your understand of strategic management for a business. These will
help sharpen your focus for using Strategic Management for a Value-added Farm Business.

1) Strategic management involves deciding what is important for the long-range success of your business and focusing on it.
2) Strategic management asks, “How should I position my business to meet management and business goals?”
3) A business strategy is a series of business decisions that lead to achieving a business goal.
4) Strategic management involves the “big picture” of your business.
5) Strategic management involves planning, analyzing and implementing a business strategy.

6) Strategic management is most effective if you can step back far enough and say “all things are possible.”
7) The essence of strategic management is matching business resources to market opportunities.
8) Strategic management involves seeking and identifying opportunities and threats in the market and industry and the outside world in general.
9) Strategic management is based on the premise that “all businesses are not the same.”
10) Strategic management involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your business.
11) When assessing strengths and weaknesses, personal skills and abilities are likely to be more important than business assets.
12) Strategic management involves looking into the future rather than dwelling on the past.
13) Strategic management is proactive rather than reactive.
14) Strategic management involves anticipating change and taking advantage of it.
15) Strategic thinking involves assessing how decisions made today will affect my business in the future.
16) Strategic management is more of a state-of mind than a rigid process.
17) A military connotation of strategic management is “it hasn’t won every war, but it has avoided a lot of ambushes.”
18) Strategic management is most useful for businesses with unique or differentiated products for niche, specialty or differentiated product markets.
19) Strategic planning comes before business planning. Strategic planning is used to identify and assess alternative business strategies. Business planning is used to implement a business strategy.
20) Strategic planning is more words and less numbers than business planning.
21) A strategic plan is a “living” document that changes as your goals and resources evolve.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

With havin so much content do you ever run into any problems
of plagorism or copyright infringement? My blog has a lot of unique content I've either created myself or outsourced but it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my agreement. Do you know any methods to help reduce content from being stolen? I'd
truly appreciate it.

Feel free to visit my homepage :: retro soda pop machine