Strategic Management

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Strategic management is the art, science and craft of formulating, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives. It is the process of specifying the organization's mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives and then allocating resources to implement the policies, and plans, projects and programs.

Strategic management seeks to coordinate and integrate the activities of the various functional areas of a business in order to achieve long-term organizational objectives. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives. Strategic management hinges upon answering three key questions:

1. What are my business’s objectives?

2. What are the best ways to achieve those objectives?

3. What resources are required to make that happen?

Answering the first question requires serious thought about what your ultimate goals are for the business. What are you trying to make happen? What are you attempting to facilitate or enable? What is the best possible outcome your company can aspire to?

Drilling down to uncover a company’s core objectives can have several phases:

• Assessing the landscape within which the company will operate, and formulating how the company sees its role within that landscape. This is commonly known as a mission statement.

• Establishing objectives to answer some of the unmet needs, taking both a long- and short-term view of what the company can offer. This is commonly known as a vision statement.

• Stipulating the goals the company has for itself, bo...

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...he 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.

“Successful Strategic Management must not end with the last annual meeting or with the final compilation of the strategic planning document.”

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