strategic management course

strategic management course

Strategic Management: A Comprehensive Guide for Business Students

1. Introduction to Strategic Management

This extensive coverage can stem from the fact that strategic management is a comprehensive field. It is the combination of many disciplines from a wide array of subjects such as marketing, management, operations, finance, organizational behavior, and IT. Many topics can fall within the realm of strategic management such as competitive advantage, strategic thinking, problem-solving, strategic planning, and action. With such a wide array of concepts, strategic management is often considered one of the capstones of business school programs. Such a course can help students to pull together the variety of information they have learned thus far, going back to their earlier program content and discussing/understanding the implications of decisions on the integration of disciplines.

Strategic management is the management of an organization’s resources in order to achieve its goals and objectives. Strategic management involves setting objectives, analyzing the competitive environment, analyzing the internal organization, evaluating strategies, and making sure that the strategies are used effectively. Many business intense programs will include a course on this topic. Indeed, depending on the program, students may have the opportunity to take multiple classes in this field. The products of these courses can include coursework on, for example, business-level strategy, corporate strategy, international strategy, strategic leadership, and various electives in different industries.

2. Strategic Analysis and Planning

Decisions on basic issues – the policy decisions – were usually the job of the chief executive and his small group of staff officers; their most comprehensive planning often resulted in only a qualitative business strategy covering but a few distinctive policy issues. Regulatory and cultural constraints and the business well-being were recognized, but were not very important in testing the policy alternatives. Many business firms have not progressed much beyond this situation, but the majority have recognized that their environments have grown increasingly complex and uncertain and that a more comprehensive approach is necessary. The modern emphasis on strategic management of that the setting of a new willingness by top management to face up to that fact. A strategic manager knows what the problems are and what has and has not been done or can and cannot be done about them. The rewards of successful management come to those who can determine whether they have an applicable chart – be it for planning a new product, developing a people processing program, or rehiring the growth directions of business enterprises with activities in all parts of the world. Success comes to those who can think and act in the complex and uncertain world of modern business and political processes. The six phases of the process require a comprehensive and orderly approach by the total staff and line organization. All must contribute their special talents to make the recall process one if approaches theoretical criteria and managers. The catalyst in all of this is you, the strategic manager.

Until the late 1950s, management textbooks focused on techniques of planning, organizing, and controlling activities of production, marketing and retailing, distribution and personnel services. Emphasis was on the functional aspects of management rather than the total development of plans and policies. Scattered through these books was some information on the importance of developing thoughtful longer-range plans, but this received little attention. Few companies operating in competitive markets, of course, could live long without having a plan for the future. Most businesses had plans of a sort, but they were not usually documented, detailed, or comprehensive. In larger companies, a planning department sometimes was set up to handle the routine of plan preparations and to pull together the various budget requirements of the functions. This compiled material was then submitted to top management for review and final approval.

3. Implementation and Execution of Strategies

“If the effective implementation of this system (or any other strategic plan) requires some passing off during each of one’s seven or eight years in the company, there’s not much use in standing up publicly for a company program unless you have time and enthusiasm to help make it a real success.” When the supporting levels demonstrate that they are getting results, not dragging bureaucracy to all action they are accepted, too, as effective members of the series running from top management to the shopfloor. Individual senior managers who demonstrate that competence can cut through politics not only are respected engineers; they are also the senior managers who compete to be chosen as head of a business from among those qualified for the position. In other words, for business success, the success by the business becomes the root. If Rowland Hughes is correct, in addition to sounding simplistic, I am being simplistic, we must “consider what is functional for the systems – human or mechanical – in order to answer the problems of the top company management.

Implementation involves establishing a series of dashboards that will enable the company to monitor the strategic tasks that result from the policy guidelines for the strategy. After the strategic thrusts have been decided, the company then has to put in place or shift resources to build and, if need be, grow businesses or market positions, or financial returns, in the case of a public corporation. The governance mechanism at the Drop3 level helps ensure that the business is building an earnings stream – it indicates what measures are important – leverages across a set of businesses to ensure that the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole. The steering responsibilities at the Drop2 level – and following up by including in Priceless, posting operating boards, or having operating executives who are used to being “hassled” in implementing Drop1 through Drop3 responsibilities, follows Rowland’s formulation of the necessity of having support alternations at each layer of the organization.

4. Evaluating and Monitoring Strategic Performance

Describing and Selecting Performance Measures Before going on to identify ways of evaluating strategic performance, it is necessary to clarify the criteria to be assessed. These criteria may be cross-functional measures relating to the period between defining strategy and a firm’s achievement of performance goals. The Balanced Scorecard aims to provide a full range of performance measures such as customer satisfaction and ratings, operational performance ratios, competition-based performance, more traditional financial measures, and measures of continuous improvement.

Introduction This chapter addresses the need for outcome measures of strategic objectives by providing an overview of how managers can evaluate and monitor the performance of a firm. Early in the strategic process, managers must be clear about the performance criteria that they want to evaluate. Having identified these criteria, managers can then select the appropriate measures of performance. Other relevant national, industry, and organizational performance indicators are also discussed. Issues of data availability can severely constrain the implementation of strategic monitoring and evaluation. Later in the chapter, we address the practical implementation of performance evaluation. Specifically, we explore the reasons why firms undertake self-evaluation, who evaluates what in an organization, and the several methods available to managers for assessing strategic performance.

5. Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Strategic Management

Strategic management is an emerging field, with a set of laws, principles, and theories that are still being developed. New fields often suffer from a proliferation of concepts and theories that are only loosely related, from a general lack of rigor, from frequent reinvention of the wheel, and from diffusion of focus due to the failure to develop a central research question to guide the research process. Research in this new field that aims to provide useful models to guide the actions of practicing managers thus requires careful design of centrality yields the discipline itself. However, there exist common understandings of what should lie at the core of strategic management. The task of formulating a strategy focuses on defining the purpose of the corporate entity, on deciding in which business areas it will be active, on developing goals and plans for achieving excellence in the areas of business activity it selects, and on finding ways of increasing shareholder wealth and creating value.

Key Takeaways: – Interesting trends have emerged recently in strategic management. They include the extensive use of business model analysis to understand how organizations create, deliver, and capture value. – Many cutting-edge strategy researchers have been focusing on ecosystem strategies and on emerging platform-based industries. They are also showing how ecological considerations create new threats and opportunities for a wide variety of organizations. – Scholars have examined how variations in national business systems in different countries influence firm-level strategies and how multinational corporations’ strategies should be modified to address these variations. – Strategy researchers have developed an increasing interest in the concept of corporate social responsibility and have studied the selection of business models and strategies designed to achieve both social and economic objectives.