Strategic Management

Strategic management consists of the analysis, decisions, and actions an organization undertakes in order to create and sustain competitive advantages. It gives the organization a sense of its objectives and a sense of how it will achieve these objectives. For Michael Porter, one of the leading strategy gurus, strategy is about achieving competitive advantage through being different. This means offering buyers a unique value, to increase their number and keep them as customers. For example, Southwest Airlines, and Ikea have developed unique, internally consistent, and difficult to imitate systems that have provided them with sustained competitive advantage..

If you don 't know where your business is going, any road will get you there.

As Mike Eskew walked through the long, open atrium of UPS’s corporate headquarters late in

Improved supplier performance: Supplier management and vendor support tools help the company to maintain the flow of raw material delivery and also to continually check the quality of

Collis, D.J., & Montgomery, C.A. (1995, July/August). Competing on resources: Strategy in the 1990s. Harvard Business Review, 73 (4). (Custom Textbook (2012), Managing Strategy in the Global Marketplace. Chapter 21.)

Strategic executives are responsible for developing strategies for the organizational structure as well as the facilities and tools required to support the mission and vision. Leaders must take into consider the degree to which the organization should operate virtually. Facilities and IT tools differ depending on the geographical location, culture, global partnerships, industry, and types of projects within an organization.

The organizational hierarchy and economic conditions directly impacts the roles and functions of business leaders. Therefore, it is imperative that one reviews organizational structure in order to understand leadership traits and characteristics. Due to the constantly evolving economy, companies are aiming to adopt a more elastic strategic management configuration so as to assist the maximization of the employee satisfaction and to get rid of any inflexibility in the organizational structures that obstruct communication. Project-based (or task-based) organizational compositions (PBO) facilitate the companies to be more elastic as this employee structure comprises of transitory project teams and responsibilities which are softened after the necessary aims have been attained (DeFillippi & Arthur.1998: Hobday, 2000; Turner & Keegan, 2001).

October Book/Article 1. John Ward and Joe Peppard, Strategic Planning for Information Systems, Third Edition , John Wiley & Sons, 2002, Chapters 4-6 2. Henderson and Venkatraman, Strategic alignment :Leveraging information technology for transforming organisations, IBM Systems Journal, Vol.36, Nos. 2&3, 1999 3. Claudio Ciborra, De Profundis? Deconstructing the concept of strategic alignment, Scandinavian Journal of information systems, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1997. 4. Michael Earl, Experiences in strategic information systems planning, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1993 A Strategy formulation contra strategy realisation, which is the most important and how should they

Strategic or institutional management is the conduct of drafting, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives[1]. 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. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives.

Strategic Management focuses on the long-term scope and direction of the organization which enables it to achieve advantages through matching resources to the changing environment to meet the need of the market and fulfill stakeholder’s expectations. The following is a strategic analysis of Manchester United, a member of the Barclay’s Premier league in the 2009 - 10 football season. This analysis is divided into three parts, namely; Market environment Analysis, Football Club Strategic Analysis and Strategic fit analysis.

Strategic planning is an organization 's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. In order to determine the direction of the organization, it is necessary to understand its current position and the possible avenues through which it can pursue a particular course of action. Generally, strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions: “What do we do?”, “For whom do we do it?”, and “How do we excel?”. In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more typically 5 years (long term), although some extend their vision to 20 years. Organizations sometimes summarize goals and

Profits arise due to an increase in output and possibly better prices. At this stage, it is cheaper for businesses to invest in increasing their market share as well as enjoying the overall growth of the market. Accordingly, significant promotional resources are traditionally invested in products that are firmly in the Growth Stage (Anderson & Zeithaml, 1984). The growth phase offers the satisfaction of seeing the product take-off in the marketplace. This is the appropriate timing to focus on increasing the market share. If the product has been introduced first into the market then it is in a position to gain market share relatively easily. A new growing market alerts the competition’s attention. The company must show all the products offerings and try to differentiate them from the competitors. A frequent modification process of the product is an effective policy to discourage competitors from gaining market share by copying or offering similar products. Other barriers are licenses and copyrights, product complexity and low availability of product components (Product Life Cycle, 2011). Promotion and advertising continues, but not in the extent that was in the introductory phase and it is oriented to the task of market leadership and not in raising product awareness. This period is the time to develop efficiencies and improve product availability and service. Cost efficiency, time-to-market, pricing and discount policy are major

Product development is crucial for maintaining product differentiation and building market share. For instance, the laundry detergent Tide has gone through more than 50 changes in formulation during the past 40 years to improve its performance. The product is always advertised as Tide, but it is a different product each year. Refiningn and improving products is a crucial strategy companies use to

In management domain, strategic management encompasses identification coupled with definition of strategies. Usually, managers employ these strategies to strive for high performance levels as well as admirable competitive advantage for business establishments. In addition to that, it includes decisions as well as acts managers set about, and which determine the outcome of the organizations’ performance.In this respect, strategic management draws higher profitability if well planned and executed. Incisively, a science is whatever skill that manifests detailed use of facts for a particular purpose. Subsequently, an art is clearly characterized as skill critical for any human tasks. Not only is strategic management a behavioral

In the third phase the planning is the outcome of more careful analysis of competitive