ate the relationship between good management and the combination of good strategy and good strategy execution; discuss the managerial process of crafting and executing a strategy; review the kinds of decisions strategic managers make at different levels of management and the roles and responsibilities of the company’s board of directors in the strategy-making and strategy-executing process. What is strategy? Different authors have defined strategy in different ways. Some of them are: A company’s strategy is management’s game plan for how to grow the business, how to attract and please customers, how to compete successfully, how to conduct operations, and how to achieve targeted objectives (Thompson and Strickland, 2005: 3). Strategic Management Module 1: Strategy, The Strategic Management Process and Ethics Page 2 Graduate Studies Program Strategy consists of the actions and business approaches management employs to achieve the targeted organisational performance. Mintzberg (1987) defined strategy as a plan, ploy, pattern, position and perspective. Strategy is a unified, comprehensive, and integrated plan … designed to ensure that the basic objectives of the enterprise are achieved (Glueck, 1980:9). Strategy involves irrevocable commitment of valuable capabilities. A company’s actual strategy is partly planned (intended) and partly reactive (adaptive) to changing circumstances. Task You are encouraged to conduct some research on the de无忧论文 【http://www.uklunwen.com】finitions of strategy and develop your own definition of strategy. Concept of competitive advantage A company has a competitive advantage when its profit rate is higher than the average for its industry and it has a sustained competitive advantage when it is able to maintain this high profit rate over a number of years (Hill and Jones, 1998:110). A company achieves sustainable competitive advantage when an attractive number of buyers prefer its products or services over the offerings of competitors and when the basis for this preference is durable. Winning a durable competitive edge over rivals hinges more on building competitively valuable expertise and capabilities than it does on having a distinctive product. Company initiatives to build competencies and capabilities that rivals do not have and cannot readily match can relate to greater product innovation capabilities than rivals, better mastery of a complex technological process, expertise in defect-free manufacturing, specialized marketing and merchandising know-how, global sales and distribution capability, superior e-commerce capabilities, unique ability to deliver personalized customer service, or anything else that constitutes a competitively valuable strength in creating, producing, distributing, or marketing the company’s product or service. What is strategic management? The term “strategic management” has yet to find a well-accepted and well-recognised definition. Viljoen and Dann (2000, p. 5) |
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