BUSINESS STRATEGY

Business Strategy

Business Strategy

Introduction

In today's world where entrepreneurs and owning your own business is considered to be the latest fashion to acquire wealth and status we see a lot of new businesses launching every month and every year but only few of them are able to maintain their position in the cutthroat competition and rivalry. Maintenance of the success of the business totally depends on the strategies a business owner adopts to operate it. Strategies are the nub that decides the success or failure of an organization. As we all well aware of the fact that, the main purpose of operating or conducting a business is to earn a profit and to run the business in a lucrative way. In order to fulfill this main ambition of the business, managers totally and completely rely on the strategies that they devise. Strategies provide direction to the business. In order to formulate strategies, it is imperative for organizations to follow a proper strategy and procedure. Following this procedure enables the organization to formulate a successful business strategy. This paper talks about business strategy and the procedure to formulate the strategy.

Business Strategy

According to Ansoff, business strategy is piloting changes in business relations system with its environment. According to Michael Porter, business strategy is the attainment of the choice of allocation of resources (financial, human, technological, etc.), committing the company in the long term goals and objectives and to attain a sustainable competitive advantage in a decisive and defensible way. According Fred R David, business strategy is all about setting goals based on the configuration of the environment and resources in the organization and allocation of resources to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The purpose of formulation of business strategy is not only to make a profit but to ensure the sustainability of the company (Thompson and Martin 2005, 65).

Steps of Forming, Implementing Business Strategy

Forming business strategy is a proper procedure that follows sequenced steps. The steps of forming, implementing and evaluating business strategy are as follows:

Step 1: Strategic Analysis

Step 2: Choice and selection of the strategy

Step 3: Strategy implementation

Step 4: Strategy evaluation

Step 1: Strategic Analysis

Mission provides direction to the organization while vision is the ability to dream and think about future with wisdom. These two factors are an integral part of the business strategy. In fact, it would not be wrong to declare that the business strategy of an organization is shaped on the basis of the mission and vision of the organization. Mission and vision of an organization describes what the organization wants to do. Once an organization decides that what they want to achieve then the organization needs to formulate the strategy to achieve these objectives. But before the formation of strategies to achieve the objectives it is indispensable for the organization to perform the process of strategic analysis. The process of strategic analysis allows the organization to take into consideration all those factors that can impede the organization to achieve its objective. In the process of strategic analysis, an organization must ...