Strategic Management: The Historical Development Of Strategic Management

Strategic management is a youthful discipline which originated in the 1950’s and 1960’s.This essay tracks the historical development of strategic management as a business discipline. From Scientific Management to Hypercompetition, the emergence of the strategic management can be tracked by the contribution of the influential scholars like Alfred Chandler, Ansoff, Michael Porter, Mintzberg and Richard D' Aveni. Although there were numerous scholars who played a role in the evolution of strategic management, but for the purpose of this essay, only above mentioned scholar’s contributions are presented. According to Rao (2008), the word strategy comes from the Greek word strategeia, which means the art or science of being a General. Successful

The scientific management model proposed by Taylor was developed to meet the needs that were constant in the typical work place in the late 19th century. Management decisions were often illogical and the productivity was significantly low characterized because of the low morale of the employees. The management did not use to pay any attention to the issues of the employees. In his book, He states that, in scientific management, the core objective of management and the company is ‘to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer and the employee’. On this base, he introduced four fundamental principles of scientific management. (Chyung, 2005) described Taylor’s principles of Scientific Management

These four principles became the basic guidelines for managing the work of individuals. Taylor's principles of scientific management revolutionized the manufacturing industry which led to increases in productivity.

Emergence of strategy Fifty years later, the term strategy evolved. The term was derived from the Greek word strategies meaning "art of the general". Prior to 1950’s, the various functions of management were separate with little overall coordination or strategy. After the World War II the idea emerged that strategic planning and implementation form a separate management process, which is now known as “Strategic management”. This wide ranging approach to developing strategy evolved over time (Rao, 2008).

Chandler’s contributions

Chandler is the first scholar who argued that strategic management is a separate discipline. Chandler described strategy as: “Determination of the long term goals and objectives of a company, the adoption of the courses of action and allocation of the resources necessary to achieve these goals” (Chandler,