Strategic Management: Many Schools of Thought

Management plays a significant role in how business operates. Strategic management has improved tremendously the last forty years. The diversity of approaches to the theoretical and practical background of management has come up with versions of what is meant by such key words as management and organization. The academia views expressed in relation to management theories take a different role than that prescribed to managers. Though there are several schools of thought ten dictate the current thinking on strategy. It ranges from the early stage of design and planning schools to the current cultural, learning and environmental Schools.

The design school turns to examine Strategy formation as achieving and creating a match between the internal strength, weakness and the external threats and opportunities of the firm. It was based on the formulation of strategy from a deliberate process that was not formal nor informal, analytical nor intuitive. Within an era of dynamic change, it was unable to keep up to the pace and eventually further research started in trying to address its shortcomings

The planning school

Alongside the design school, the planning school grew in the strategic field. It is quite similar to the design school but argued that the formulation process of strategy was formal. It was grounded on the systems theory of the social sciences

The positioning school

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, meaning is given to strategy from a military point of view. It’s the representation of his work that is applied in firms in industries and in the evolution of the value chain analysis and the game theories. Drawing on military history and industrial organisational economies, its main theme was to analyse. Basically, it’s all about the facts and nothing but the fact.

However, critics of this school contend that strategy is just positions through a formal way in which something is placed in relation to its surrounding

The entrepreneurial school

Not actually based on any discipline, some of its writings were borrowed from economics. Its strategic ideas was deeply rooted in intuition, moving strategy to an entirely new field of not clearly expressed vision though the concept of a leader with a vision was making grounds at that time.

The cognitive School

This school of thought saw strategic development as a mental process. It seeks to find out what occurs in the mind of strategists from a psychological point of view. If the strategy models developed in the minds of people, can we get to know how these minds function.