Patterns in Strategy Formation

Andrews, K., 2010. The Concept of Corporate Strategy, 3rd Edition. Financial Times Prentice Hall. [Accessed 13 April 2014]

According to Mantere (2013) organizational strategy exhibits a division of linguistic labour, where responsibility for key concepts is assigned to particular individuals or organizational functions. Such linguistic experts oversee the proper use and maintenance of strategy language. The language-based view helps to understand linkages between institutional, network, organizational, and micro level views on strategy. It also problematizes widely held intuitions regarding the relationship between strategy and organizational outcomes. When both of them are executed well an organization will achieve best possible outcome. In business, the Structure follows strategy, which means that a corporate structure is created in order to implement a given corporate strategy. For example in the middle of operational and choice making levels numerous layers makes it difficult to see the week signs identifying with business sector opportunities and dangers which brings about wrong

Strategy is a set of complicated tactics formulated by the executives of a company directed towards the achievement of company’s goal (Salmela, 2002). It is about all the path ways that a company would follow to reach its ultimate goal. It is a company’s strategy which helps to identify what it does better than the other companies in the industries, which may be different from what it does best. For successful strategy formulation and implementation, a company should know the needs of customers and should have knowledge of its competitors. Through a good strategy a company would identify that opportunity which makes it different from the others (Thompson, 2005).

Chapter 6 – Strategy Formulation: Situation Analysis and Business StrategyChapter 7 – Strategy Formulation: Corporate StrategyChapter 8 – Strategy Formulation: Functional strategy and Strategic Choice

Mintzberg, H. Research . (1972) On strategy-making', Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Academyo f Management,N Minneapolis.

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Miles and Snow have produced a typology of business level strategies. Their typology involves four strategic types: defenders, prospectors, analyzers and reactors. Using Miles and Snow’s strategy typology that consist of; defender, analyzer, reactor, and prospector, I will categorize Dollar Tree in its strategy typology. In the first strategy defenders try to carve a niche in the market where stability can be found. As in the prospector strategy, companies are constantly producing innovations. I understand through Miles and Snow typology of business level strategies that defenders, analyzers, and prospectors are forms of organizations. Therefore, if an alignment is reached between a chosen strategy, and organizational structure mentioned above Dollar Tree has the potential to be a

Mintzberg (1984, pp. 69) suggests “the notion strategy is something that should happen way up there far removed from the details of running an organisation on a daily basis and is one of the great fallacies of conventional strategic

With the understanding of the research philosophy and the selection of the appropriate approach made above, now it is much easier to strategize the type of research to solve the research problem and its sub-problems. There are many strategies in research. The most common ones are experimenting, survey, case study, action research, grounded theory, ethnography and archival research.

“Strategy as Revolution” is also associated with a set of weaknesses that compromise the quality of the article. For instance, the author recommends top executives to gather the viewpoints of lower rank employees in terms of strategy formulation; however, Hamel (1996) fails to highlight the ways these viewpoints can be filtered taking into account the fact that there could be dozens if not hundred ideas and implementing all of them is not practical.

When selecting a research approach, Creswell (2014) outlines criteria that affect the choice of one approach over another. I have already discussed how my worldview, personal experiences, and identified problem of practice and the questions affect my research. The design, methods, and audience of my emerging research will also be considered in terms of choosing a research approach.

Strategy can be defined as being different from one’s competitors, finding the race to operate and accomplished it. According to Michael Porter (1996), while becoming better at what you do is desirable, it will not benefit you in the long run because it is something other competitors can also do. Strategies for organizations are originally developed by Michael E. Porter in 1979 by introducing the five forces model. A company can identify the industry profitability and attractiveness by analyzing the five forces of Porter (Johnson et al., 2008). And then a reasonable strategy can be set up in line with the strengths and the weakness of an organization is able to create a plan for a stronger position for the organization within its

The prime managerial value of management research is that it reduces uncertainty by providing information that improves the decision-making process. The decision –making process associated with the development and implementation of a strategy involves four interrelated stages.

Changing circumstances and ongoing management efforts to improve the strategy cause a company 's strategy to evolve over time—a condition that makes the task of crafting a strategy a work in progress,

A strategy, according to Robbins and Barnwell (2002, p. 139) is “the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary to achieve the organisation’s goals”.