strategic management

(noun)

The art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its objectives.

Related Terms

Examples of strategic management in the following topics:

  • Strategic Management

    • Strategic management entails five steps: analysis, formation, goal setting, structure, and feedback.
    • Strategic management analyzes the major initiatives, involving resources and performance in external environments, that a company's top management takes on behalf of owners.
    • As strategic management is a large, complex, and ever-evolving endeavor, it is useful to divide it into a series of concrete steps to illustrate the process of strategic management.
    • Leaders allocate resources to specific projects and enact any necessary strategic partnerships.
    • Identify the five general steps that allow businesses to develop a strategic process

  • The Importance of Strategy

    • Strategic management is critical to organizational development as it aligns the mission and vision with operations.
    • Strategic management is critical to the development and expansion of all organizations.
    • The initial task in strategic management is to compile and disseminate the organization's vision and mission statement.
    • 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.
    • Strategic management seeks to coordinate and integrate the activities of a company's various functional areas in order to achieve long-term organizational objectives.

  • Differences Between Strategic Planning at Small Versus Large Firms

    • Strategic management can depend on the size of an organization and the proclivity of change in its business environment.
    • Size is highly relevant to organizational strategy and structure, and understanding the influencing factors is important for management to elect optimal strategic plans.
    • MNEs (multinational enterprises) may employ a more structured strategic management model due to its size, scope of operations, and need to encompass stakeholder views and requirements.
    • Innovate ideas are primarily trial and error, and so instilling creativity into a strategic process is also a high-risk approach.
    • Apply the size of a firm to the basic strategic management theories

  • Planning a Project

    • Implementing a framework for generating a project-planning cycle, complete with strategic objectives, implementation methods, and assessment, is a primary responsibility of strategic managers.
    • This step-by-step process highlights each feasible stage in the project-management cycle.
    • By appropriately incorporating each stage of the model into the planning process, managers can effectively forecast the deliverable, and they can avoiding losing value by accurately assessing the margins that will be produced in a given strategic initiative.
    • As shown in the figure, there are five basic strategic management steps in the planning cycle.
    • Outline the five basic stages in the planning cycle as derived within the field of strategic management

  • Implementing Strategy

    • Strategic planning involves managing the implementation process, which translates plans into action.
    • The following stages constitute the strategic implementation process:
    • Allocating and managing sufficient resources (financial, personnel, operational support, time, technology support)
    • Strategy implementation also involves managing the overall process.
    • The strategic management process never ends.

  • Balanced Scorecards

    • A balanced scorecard is a device that managers use to convey performance across a range of relevant strategic criteria.
    • A balanced scorecard is a semi-standardized strategic management tool used to track, monitor, update, and improve key performance indicators (KPI) within an organization.
    • These variables are generally a mix of financial and non-financial indicators that allow managers to better control strategic operational and financial commercial outcomes.
    • Corporate strategic objectives were added to justify focusing on certain perspectives, effectively absorbing the original framework into a more comprehensive strategic planning exercise.
    • Today, this second-generation balanced scorecard is often referred to as a "strategy map", but the vernacular "balanced scorecard" is still used to refer to anything consistent with a pictographic strategic management tool.

  • Overview of Types of Strategic Plans

    • The broader overview of strategic plans, as well as the five subgroups within strategic planning, provide businesses with direction.
    • Strategic management is primarily concerned with the planning and execution processes that lead to the effective operations of a business.
    • Strategic management leverages strategic planning in order to design and execute a variety of plans specifically created to approach various facets of the business and competitive environment.
    • It is worth analyzing the broader overview of strategic plans, as well as the five subgroups within strategic planning that provide businesses with an outline of their strategic direction.
    • Long-range plans are those most closely related to the overall strategic-planning process.

  • Competitive Dynamics

    • The competition is a moving-target, ever-evolving and adapting to better capture market share and profitability; therefore competition is a critical area of analysis for strategic managers.
    • Observing and predicting competitive movements and dynamics is a key to success and a primary responsibility of upper management.
    • In marketing and strategic management, competitor analysis is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors.
    • First, profiling can reveal strategic weaknesses in rivals that the firm may exploit.
    • Third, this proactive knowledge can give the firm strategic agility.

  • Middle-Level Management

    • Middle management is the intermediate management level accountable to top management and responsible for leading lower level managers.
    • Middle-level managers can include general managers, branch managers, and department managers.
    • Because middle managers are more involved in the day-to-day workings of a company, they can provide valuable information to top managers that will help them improve the organization's performance using a broader, more strategic view.
    • Reporting performance statistics up the chain of command and, when applicable, recommending strategic changes
    • Because middle managers work with both top-level managers and first-level managers, middle managers tend to have excellent interpersonal skills relating to communication, motivation, and mentoring.

  • Cooperative Strategy

    • Strategic Alliances and Interfirm Knowledge Transfer.
    • Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 17, Special Issue: Knowledge and the Firm, pp. 77-91), shared expenses, and shared risk.
    • Upper management is tasked with the developing complex interactive strategies when entering a strategic alliance.
    • The following steps highlight key aspects of the strategic alliance process:
    • Identify the steps involved in forming a strategic alliance to employ cooperative strategies