Strategy Formulation, as Outlines by Henry Mintzberg and Joseph Lampel, to the Focus on Strategic Management Within the Education Sector.

L; and Jones, Gereth, R. (2013, 2010, & 2008). Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach, (Tenth, Ed). Mason, OH. South-Western Cengage learning.

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).

Pearce, J. A. II, & Robinson, R. B. (2009). Strategic management: Formulation, implementation, and control (11th ed.). [University of Phoenix Custom Edition e-text]. New York: McGraw-Hill. Retrieved August 20, 2011, fr

Wheelen, T. L., & Hunger, J. D. (2010). Concepts in strategic management and business policy (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Strategic Management is the theory and practice of making decisions that shape the future of the firm. This course looks at the content and process of strategic decision making from the perspective of managers who are responsible for an entire business unit. These may be individuals who are acting in the capacity of a Chief Executive of a company, divisional General Managers, or departmental heads. It is also the perspective most

Hubbard, G, Rice, J and Beamish, P 2008, Strategic Management, Pearson Education Australia, 3rd, Frenchs Forest, Australia.

The composition of many different departmental strategies makes up the single organization-wide strategic plan. Top higher education administrators are responsible for the overall strategic plan but the deans and managers are responsible for creating solid departmental strategies that are crucial to the strategic plan and implementation effort. Higher education institutions are beginning to adopt the successful practices that are used by profit based businesses. Following are five strategy making and implementation process tasks that managers are responsible for:

A strategy is a tool that intended to help the firm to achieve and sustain its competitive advantage and the right integration of business concepts. Sound and efficient strategy is the one that consists of clearly expressed long term and short term goals and objectives and at the same time help to achieve competitive advantage and to reinforce strong visions, meeting the goals/objective throughout the mission. It also ensures that all the company’s elements relevantly aligned. McKinsey & Company has a mission statement that focuses on ensuring it helps their clients make positive, long lasting and substantial improvements in their performance and as result build a firm that will be able to attract, develop, excite and most over retain exceptional people. In this paper, we are going to look at the McKinsey & Company evolving history, its current operation, SWOT analysis, future opportunities, major strategic issues and personal recommendations.

1. Hanson, D., Hitt, M.A., Ireland, R.D., & Hoskisson, R.E. (2014). Strategic management: Competitiveness and globalization (5th Asia-Pacific Edition). South Melbourne: Cengage Learning Australia. ISBN: 9780170227643 (paperback)

In the book “Good Strategy and Bad Strategy”, Richard Rumelt illustrates examples of success and failure of business management to explain the true meaning of the strategy, and tells companies how to develop a correct strategy and adhere to core of management strategy. He also emphasizes the central role of strategic management as to remind the readers to understand the huge difference between a good strategy and bad strategy. This book has three sections: good and bad strategy, sources of power, and thinking like a strategist. I will be evaluating strengths and weaknesses under these topics. After finish reading the book, I had gained a better understanding of what a good strategy means to the success of a company. According to Rumelt, a good strategy is coherent, where companies pursue multiple objectives that are connected with each other. Rumelt points out that a good strategy consists of three elements: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. (71) First, diagnosis means to define the obstacles and challenges that the companies are facing, and guidelines help the people to overcome the obstacles. Lastly, coherent action is the activities or actions that company did to be consistent with its guiding policy. Today, many of us lost the focus of the strategy, which results in the downward of businesses and organizations. Rumelt has defined the strategy as acknowledging the main problems and take coherent action to overcome the problems. Moreover, he illustrates

This school sees strategy formation as a visionary process and is fell under the descriptive school of strategic management. The chief architect of the strategy is the CEO of a company. This school took formal leadership seriously and CEO is responsible for strategy formulation. It stressed on mental state and processes such as instinctive knowledge, belief, wisdom, experience and insight of a single leader. The leader should be visionary in formulating strategy. The entrepreneurial school promotes strategy as a process which has a clear image and sense of direction which can be termed as a vision. Entrepreneurial strategy often occurs in startup companies and organizations in trouble and needing a

‘Strategic Management’ is a very complex term as many eminent researchers and scholars have had different views and conclusions on strategy. According to White (2004), “Strategic Management involves both systematically developing an idea together with its implications and testing the empirical validity & usefulness of that idea against the real world.” Thus strategy is not only about planning for future but also about confirming the validity of the hypothesis considered and implementing it successfully. Strategy formation may take various forms such as implicit, explicit or emergent. Implicit strategy is a strategy formed by intuitions of an individual. As per implicit strategists, strategic management is about reading the environment

Learning school (F) began from the early works of Lindblom. It posits that strategy is an emerging process and strategists can be identified at all cadres in an organization.

A strategy is said to be a plan that is made for the long term success of a product or brand. It is extremely important to have a strategy in order to figure out a direction towards which any company is able to focus all its resources efficiently and achieve desired outcomes. Formulating effective strategies is a considerably long process in itself that combines analysing several factors, situations and issues that are already present in a company and looking to improve on them alongside trying to implement various innovations and ideas to collectively create a direction towards which they can move and direct the resources available to them.

Hill, Charles W. L. and Gareth R. Jones. Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.