STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Strategic Development- A Long Term View of Queen Mary University of London



Strategic Development- A Long Term View of Queen Mary University of London

Introduction

Strategic management is one of the very vital and important concepts in the management literature and its importance cannot be stressed enough in today's competitive world. Many companies either sore to the heights of success and fame by strategically placing themselves or become a failure and face closure. That next question that should come in mind is what strategic management is. Strategic management as many scholars say is the organizational management activity that the organization uses to focus its resources and energy, lay down its priorities, strengthen its operations, make sure that the employees and other stakeholders of the organization are focusing and working towards achieving the common goals, ascertain agreement around planned results and outcomes and continually asses and therefore adjust the organization's direction in reaction to the changing business environment (BSI, n.d, p.1 ).

Strategic management can be taken as a comprehensive and broad collection of the organizations ongoing processes and activities that the organization uses to systematically and thoroughly align and coordinate the actions and the resources that an organization possesses with the mission, vision values, and strategy throughout the organization. The activities that are carried out in relation to strategic management make it possible for the organization to transform the static plans in to a fully fledged system that is able to give strategic performance and feedback to the important task of decision making and so makes it possible for the plan to grow and evolve as other circumstances and requirements change (Dess et al., 2005, p.1). Strategic management is the controlled effort that generates essential actions and decisions for the organization that majorly guides and shapes what an organization is, what it does who it serves and why it does it, with a special focus on the future.

An important element of strategic management is strategic planning which is supposed to put the strategic management decisions in action. So a strategic plan is that document which is attributed to communicate with the organization members the strategic decisions about the organizational goals and the actions that would be required to achieve those set goals (ANM, n.d, p.1). It also includes all other important and critical elements that are developed during the planning exercise. Many authors state that for a strategic plan to be effective it should be able to articulate not only the fact that where the organization is going and the actions that are required to take it to that level or position to make progress but should also contain the measures to see if it successfully achieved the set goals or not (Collis et al., 2008, pp. 82-90).

Therefore strategic management and planning consists of few steps and many authors according to their research and expertise have given various methodologies and frameworks for strategic management and planning (Mintzberg, 1994, pp. 23-25). The management gurus have not yet defined any absolute rules as to what ...