STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Strategic Management

Strategic Management

Table of Contents

Strategy as a natural and human activity3

Strategy in Organizations3

Strategy as a perspective4

Management systems for coordination and control5

Types of Competitive Advantage6

The Strategic Role of Resources and Capabilities8

Stage three: Strategy Implementation9

Strategy as a natural and human activity

Strategies in natural systems seem to emerge spontaneously from the interaction between environment and organisms over time. Whether and individual or a population will be more or less successful to cope with environmental changes is determined by the capability to respond to such changes, or in other words, by their capability of adaptation. Therefore, there is an implicit link between strategy and the need to adapt successfully to new conditions in the surrounding environment. Here, however, strategy seems a little closer to instinct than to deliberation.

Strategy in Organizations

Over time, the influence of organizations over life has increased continuously, particularly in most developed economies. They have become the building blocks of societies. Today, individuals and groups, derive their identities from organizations. They influence the present and shape the future. Organizations share more power than individuals do.

People increasingly delegates roles and tasks to organizations. We trust them with the production and control of resources and infrastructure. We are gradually becoming dependant on the functioning of organizations. Hence, organizations such as business entities do increasingly rely in the strategic management of their resources and capabilities in order to stay competitive, learn and adjust to changes to survive. Knowing more about organizations and their behaviour is an important issue in strategic management. Learning about organizations, their origin and evolution is also important for us as individuals. After all, the decisions driving organizations strategic or not will influence life in more than one way. For better or worse, organizations are here to stay (Selznick, 2009, 234-245).

However, it is discussed that on the development of organizations over time and the basic way they function and behave. It depicts how an organization organizes, grows, and evolves overtime. The focus of this review is on the business organization, the firm and their strategic quest to create value for profit increasingly in order to adjust and survive over time. Since there are as many definitions and perspectives in organizational theory as many type of organizations we might find, the review focuses on the unifying work of Baum and Rowley (2005) on organizational theory, and Grant on (2008b) on business organizations and industrial dynamics.

Strategy as a perspective

Strategy as a perspective is a more abstract way to achieve a goal since it does not directly regard a market or a business action but the style or way a firm does things. This implies a view to the inside of the firm and how over time, things tend to be done in a particular way. Such a way might be influenced by the overall perspective of the firm to do businesses: it refers to the vision of the company or what the company wants to be in the future. The vision is therefore, a permanent reference acting as a guidance and inspiration for strategic ...