strategy

Strategy

Materials for the Course

"Strategy and Organization"

(for Syllabus for a standard "Strategy" course, click here: Strategy Syllabus)

Companies have long known that, to be competitive, they must develop a good strategy and then appropriately realign structure, systems, leadership behavior, human resource policies, culture, values and management processes.

Strategic Management refers to the process of analyzing the current situation, developing appropriate strategies, putting those strategies into action and evaluating, modifying, or changing those strategies as needed (Coulter & Robbins, "Strategic Management").

Strategic management is important because: (1) it results in higher organizational performance, (2) it requires that managers examine and adapt to business environment changes, (3) it coordinates diverse organizational units, helping them focus on organizational goals, (4) it is very much involved in the managerial decision-making process (Robbins and Coulter, "Management", 2005).

While there is no single, universally accepted definition for ‘strategy’, definitions are likely to converge on the following: “strategy is a plan—some sort of consciously intended course of action, a guideline (or set of guidelines) to deal with a situation” (Mintzberg et al., "The Strategy Process", 2003). A company’s strategy is management’s action plan for running the business and conducting operations. The crafting of a strategy represents a managerial commitment to pursue a particular set of actions .

Strategic Management is an inter-disciplinary field of study, requiring understanding and incorporation of such notions as: the Business Environment, Organizational Structure, Organizational Culture, etc., as shown below:

*Figure courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare website: http://ocw.mit.edu

Another familiar framework is Michael Porter's Model of Generic Strategies:

Porter's Five Forces Model points to the impact on the firm of five critical forces, viz.: (1) Competitors, (2) Entrants, (3) Substitutes, (4) Suppliers, and (5) Buyers. This interplay is shown in the Figure below:

The important thing to take note of is the set of INFLUENCES on a firm's strategic direction and the need to focus on the firm's CORE COMPETENCIES, as shown below (from Pearce & de Kluyver, "Strategy: View from the Top", Prentice-Hall):

__________________________________________________________________________________________

For a Working Paper version of my Strategy paper entitled

“Relationship between Strategic Orientation and Organizational Performance:

An Exploratory Study of Philippine Companies”

accepted for publication in Philippine Management Review (PMR) 2006,

click here: Strategy Paper