Part 1: The Process of Strategic Planning
1.1 Explain the concept of strategy, vision, mission, goals, objectives and core competencies.
Corporate Strategy.
"Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations".
(Johnson and Scholes, year)
Corporate Strategy is the direction and scope of action, which the company intends to take in the long term, to achieve their goals and gain competitive advantage. The strategy aims at adopting the company and its activities to changes occurring in its environment in such a way as to ensure its long-term survival and development. The company 's strategy includes all of its activities and takes into account the external and internal environment.
Levels of Strategy
According to a popular strategic management model developed by Johnson and Scholes the corporate strategy occurs on different levels:
Strategy across the enterprise - refers to the direction in which the moving company as a whole. This is an extremely important level, as it is mainly here are taken into account expectations of external groups, such as shareholders.
Strategy business units - applies to the way in which individual business units inside the company operate in order to enable the implementation of the strategy.
Operational strategy - refers to the way in which
Company strategy is management plan of how to best use of company resources to achieve the business goals successfully, includes what products and services provided that can attract and sustain customers, how the company positioning in the industry environment, how to develop and increase their sustainable competitive advantage, continuous improvements of processes in different functional such as R&D, marketing, systems and operations, and how to deliver the superior value to customers.
‘Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term, which achieves advantage in a changing environment through it’
Strategy is a set of complicated tactics formulated by the executives of a company directed towards the achievement of company’s goal (Salmela, 2002). It is about all the path ways that a company would follow to reach its ultimate goal. It is a company’s strategy which helps to identify what it does better than the other companies in the industries, which may be different from what it does best. For successful strategy formulation and implementation, a company should know the needs of customers and should have knowledge of its competitors. Through a good strategy a company would identify that opportunity which makes it different from the others (Thompson, 2005).
Strategy refers to the plan or action taken to achieve organizational goals. When Ellen took over Tufts-NEMC, the hospital was struggling with payroll and scale. Ellen had to focus on meeting payroll, a short-term strategy, and could not focus entirely on the longer term. She took some immediate measures to help cut cost
Strategy: an organizations long term course of action designed to deliver a unique customer experience while achieving its goals.
According to Slack et al. The corporate strategy or business strategy is the guide lines for the whole corporation’s businesses in relation to its markets, customers, and the competitors (2007). In the same context, the same authors discussed the link between the corporate strategy and
A strategy is a plan that is targeted over the long run. Business level strategies refers to strategic alternatives that an organization chooses from as it conducts business in a particular industry or market (Griffin,2002). A corporate level strategy means that a company manages its operations simultaneously across many industries and markets. Netflix operates across both a business and corporate level strategy. The main areas across which Netflix operate on in their corporate level are business portfolio and partnerships.
Strategy is about which product or services should be produced and offered to which markets and which the customer needs and wants are met whilst achieving the objectives of the organization while making a profit – how each business aim to achieve its mission within its selected area of activity.
An organisation’s strategy plays an important role of providing direction of where company wants to be and how best to allocate the company’s resources to meet its objectives. The formulation of business strategies has evolved over the years and has been made more difficult in recent by the uncertain operating environments and global financial crises.
Alfred Chandler(1963) defines strategy as ‘ the determination of the long-run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals’. And Michael porter(1996) sees it as ‘Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value’.
There is no exact definition for Strategy because it is defined in different ways as some people think that make a plan to get success in future is a strategy while others think that future is hard to predict. Exceptionally, some Japanese companies have no strategies though these companies have a good cost and continuous improvement. The definition for strategy is to explain the direction and scope of any company for the long term to achieve advantage for the company or to fulfill the needs and expectations. Strategy is different from Operational effectiveness and they work in different manner in the companies. Michael Porter, who is a professor at Harvard Business School and a strategy expert, says that it should determine how organizational resources and skills should create advantage. Accordingly, Strategy can also be defined as an organizational change during actions in the organizations for better and advantageous results or to determine how we win and get success in the future period. It is a needful developed plan with respect to market to compete the world. Organizations should be responsible for competitive changes according to the market. It is the main goal for any Organizations. Business/IT strategy is very important to know the success rate of your business. Apart from Business Strategy, the other two main types of strategy are Corporate Strategy and Team Strategy. These strategies give competitive advantage of cost leadership, differentiation and focus. The
A company 's strategy consists of the competitive moves and business approaches that managers are employing to grow the business, attract and please customers, compete successfully, conduct operations, and achieve the targeted levels of organizational performance.
Johnson, Wittington, Scholes, Angwin and Regnér (2014, p. 3) defines strategy as ‘the long-term direction of an organisation’.
Strategic Planning set the stage for the rest of the planning in the firm. It involves defining a clear company mission, setting supporting company objectives, designing a sound business portfolio and coordinating functional strategies. At corporate level the company first defines its overall purpose and mission.
Strategy: The unifying theme that gives coherence and direction to the decisions of an organization Strategic Management: Consisting of the analysis, decisions, and actions an organization undertakes in order to create and sustain competitive advantages. Or, the Strategic Management Process is: The full set of commitments, decisions, and actions required for a firm to create value and earn aboveaverage returns. (Hitt, Hoskinson, & Ireland, 2004, p. 4)