Strategic management typically involves defining objectives, planning activities, implementing programs and assessing results. Effective business professionals identify the key success factors for their industry and respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. Comprehensive strategic planning activities include analyzing current business conditions and determining adapt to current trends. Effectively managing change typically involves creating awareness about the reasons for strategic transitions or transformations and implementing programs to enable conversion.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning activities define the company's mission and objectives. A mission statement typically describes what the company does, the primary customers and the company's core values. Strategic objectives define what the company plans to achieve and a timetable for accomplishing these tasks. Through the use of meetings, email, newsletters, a company intranet website and other communication mechanisms, company leaders create awareness about the company's current strategic direction. If the present objectives include a change from past direction, leaders typically describe the reasons for the adjustment, new tactics and expected results to prepare employees for the new way of doing business.
Capitalizing on Strengths
By conducting a thorough internal analysis, company leaders identify company strengths. Successful executives administer a comprehensive evaluation to discover details about the current company culture, staff competency, operational capacity and other assets. Using techniques such as facilitating focus groups, conducting surveys and holding personal interviews, these managers find out what's really going on in the organization. By conducting market research, using resources from websites such as Gartner, Forrester Research and Dun and Bradstreet, executives identify potential new business opportunities based on competitive analysis. Effective leadership involves creating awareness about a company's available assets so that employees can exploit opportunities to ensure company profitability.
Responding to Threats
New technology, changes in the economy, political unrest and other social upheaval can pose a threat to conducting business as usual. To manage these risks, effective leaders maintain a list of events that could impact business. By determining the probability of occurrence, the cost of impact and plausible solutions, leaders prepare a comprehensive risk management plan. If these events occur, the company is ready and able to handle the changes by ignoring them, accepting them or deferring them to the others, such as suppliers or partners.
Creating a Competitive Advantage
By reviewing a competitor's annual shareholder reports, analyst interviews and press releases, successful managers learn about what the company's rivals are doing in the global marketplace. Using this information, company leaders can structure recruiting and hiring initiatives, marketing campaigns and projects to gain a competitive edge. An effective strategic management plan includes details about advantageous strategic partnerships and any proposed mergers or acquisitions to create awareness and prepare for changes.
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