The Anatomy Of A Corporate Strategy

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

According to Slack et al. The corporate strategy or business strategy is the guide lines for the whole corporation’s businesses in relation to its markets, customers, and the competitors (2007). In the same context, the same authors discussed the link between the corporate strategy and

Strategy formulation has been acknowledged as one of the most crucial factors of ensuring the long-term growth of the business. However, the manner in which strategy is formulated, and most importantly, the nature of the strategy chosen for the company determines its future position in the marketplace (Grant, 2005).

Johnson, G., Scholes, K., & Whittington, R. (2006). Exploring Corporate Strategy (Text and Cases) (8 ed.). Prentice Hall.

Corporate Strategy has been defined by numerous authors. Grant (1995) claims corporate strategy deals with the way a corporation manages a number of different businesses. Lynch, R, in both his third and fourth edition books on corporate strategy refers to Penrose (1959) definition of corporate strategy as “the pattern of major objectives, purposes or goals and essential polices or plans for achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or to be in and the kind of company it is or to be”

‘Essentially, developing a competitive strategy is developing a broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry out those goals’ (Porter, 1980, p. xvi). The strategic aims of strategy can be very different depending on the needs of the business; however, they may include expansion, market leadership and brand building. There are different views on strategy and how they can be implemented, which are explored in this start of this essay.

A Company can only gain its market position and to survive in business through sustainable business development. Hence, to gain competitive advantages, it is essential that every company has a better strategy which will finally help them to turn their weakness in to strengths and threats into opportunities. According to Johnson and Scholes, he defines strategy as “the direction and scope of an organization over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfill stakeholder expectations" (tutor2u, 2015). In order to determine and identify the best strategy, internal and external environmental factors that affect company should be fully understood. A thorough strategic analysis needs to be done to help businesses understand where their companies best fit into the wider marketplace. The strategic analysis of the company aims mangers to think about the key influences on the company's current position and to begin thinking about how those influences can be manipulated to get the company where it wants and

Implementing Corporate Strategy – By having an overall scope and direction of a corporation, corporate strategy will be able to detect the general attitude toward growth. By using the three main categories for Corporate Strategy which are stability, growth and retrenchment would guide the corporations toward its goal and objective.. The advantage of corporate strategy in connection with the corporation’s goal and objectives is that a corporation can gain financial advantage if it enters into a joint venture or acquires other companies it can increase profits, cash flow and borrowing

In this assignment we compare a classic and a systemic perspective of strategy. When talking about strategy one will often find the name Michael Eugene Porter. His books, models, frameworks and theories are often seen as basics in the field of strategy. His most significant and popular framework is the five forces analysis (Porter, 1980). According to Whittington (1993), Porter is placed within the classic approach of strategy. In total he introduces four perspectives which are the classic, the evolutionary, the processual and the systemic. He argues that each perspective had an identifiable decade in which it was dominant. Accordingly, the classic perspective is placed in a timeframe starting at 1960. The main intention in the classic perspective is the maximizing return on investment. Besides Porter, Ansoff and Chandler are important names for the classic approach. Since

Corporate strategy is defined as the overall scope and direction of an organisation and the way in which its various operations work together to achieve particular objective. An organisation’s objectives can only be achieved if the vision and mission statement is realistic and the strategy is implemented.

Alfred Chandler(1963) defines strategy as ‘ the determination of the long-run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals’. And Michael porter(1996) sees it as ‘Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value’.

Corporate strategy helps companies to create value by investing in a valuable set of resources and designing the organization structure. However, like every strategy, it has some issues that apply to firms of every size. Most industrial activity in developed countries is carried out by large corporations that compete in more than one market. The companies have to calibrate their assets in order to create a balanced portfolio. We will discuss trough this first part of our subject, the different tools which will help us reach this specific aspect of strategy.

Strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long term, which accomplishes advantage in a changing environment by its combination of the existing resources and the competencies with purpose of meeting the stakeholders’ expectations. The characteristics of the strategy are as follows:

This essay is on strategy and various challenges that an organization has to face in the process of developing and implementing a strategy. It is also explained how organizations have to come up with different strategies for different levels in the organization and how companies in the past have suffered because of inadequate strategies.