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003
STRATEGIC
MANAGEMENT: AN INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Planning is an
elusive subject. There is no such thing as "an effective unique way to
plan". Planning is a complex social activity that cannot be simply
structured by rules of thumbs or quantitative procedures. The essence of
planning is to organize, in a disciplined way, the major tasks that the firm
has to address to maintain an operational efficiency in its existing
businesses and to guide the organization into a new and better future.
An effective planning
system has to deal with two relevant dimensions: responding to changes in the
external environment and creatively deploying internal resources to improve the
competitive position of the firm. The maintenance of a vigilant attitude toward
external changes is a major driving force behind the capability shown by firms
to survive in a hostile environment. The lack of alertness to changes in
economic, competitive, social, political, technological, demographic, and legal
factors can become extremely detrimental for the sustained growth and
profitability of firms.
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004
HOW TO HARNESS CHANGE FOR SUCCESS,
Although we know a good deal
about the conditions and processes of change,we have no satisfactory explanation
of why change occurs. Possibly the explanation lies in the human capacity for
becoming bored. Most of the higher species, whenever not hunting, eating, or
mating, simply go to sleep - as much as twenty hours a day. Humans cannot sleep
that much, and human boredom may be the true cause of social change [Hirschman,
1982]
Another asnwer is simply to assume that
change is a constant in the universe, which needs no explanation. A constant is
something which is always present. Populations grow and decline; fashions come
and go; mountains are pushed upward and erode away; even the sun is gradully
burning itself out.
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005
The
Manager's Job, Folklore and Fact.
By Henry Mintzberg
Henry
Mintzberg asks, "What do managers do?" After conducting his own study of five
CE0s and analyzing other studies of managers and how they work, he concludes
that managerial work involves interpersonal roles, informational roles,
and decisional roles. These roles require a number of skills:
developing peer relationships, carrying out
negotiations, motivating subordinates, resolving conflicts, establishing
information networks and disseminating information, making decisions with little
or ambiguous information, and allocating resources.
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006
Management Tasks
, Responsibilities, Practices
by Peter Drucker The
Father of Management
A business enterprise is
created and managed by people and not by forces. Economic forces set limits
to what management can do. They create opportunities for management's
action. But they do not by themselves determine what a business is or what
it does. Nothing could be sillier than the oft-repeated assertion that
"management only adapts the business to the forces of the market".
Management not only has to find these forces, it has to create them.
Another conclusion is that
a business cannot be defined or explained in terms of profit. Asked what a
business is, the typical businessman is likely to answer, "An organization to
make a profit". The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. This
answer is not only false, it is irrelevant.
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007
Strategy: Winning in the Marketplace: Core Concepts, Analytical Tools, Cases
Arthur A. Thompson Jr., University of Alabama
John E. Gamble, University of Southern Alabama
A.J. Strickland III, University of Alabama
Copyright year: 2004
Our
Site
ISBN: 0072847700
Copyright year: 2004
Book Site
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008
The
Concept Of Strategy
Competition existed long
before strategy. Competition began with life itself. The first one-cell
organisms required certain resources for maintenance of life. When those
resources were adequate, then each generation became greater in number than the
preceding one. If there had been no limitation on required resources, then
exponential growth would have led to infinite numbers.
But as life
evolved, the single-cell life form became a food resource for more complex life.
With increasing complexity, each level became the resource for the next higher
level. When two competitors were in perpetual competition, one inevitably
displaced the other, unless something prevented it. In the absence of some
counterbalancing force to maintain a stable equilibrium between the two
competitors by giving each an advantage in its own territory, only one
competitor survived.
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009
Business
Wargames
by Barrie G. James
It is unlikely in the foreseeable future that the world
will return to a period of sustained non-inflationary growth, and
companies must therefore face the fact that survival and growth is now
largely dependent on taking markets away from competitors, protecting
business from competitive aggression, and deterring an assault on their
markets. Business has always been competitive, but now more than ever
companies require strategies which truly reflect the combative nature of the
market-place. The closest analogy to current market conditions is war.
Despite differences in degree and in kind between business and military
conflict, there are remarkable similarities between the two sets of
precepts. Companies and armies share common strategic manoeuvres in terms
of deterrence, offence, defence and alliance. They are similar in the
way in which they are organized and structured. They use equivalent
systems and procedures and rely on the same functions - intelligence,
weaponry, logistics and communications - to provide a combat edge. The
resemblance between the two forms of conflict is not surprising since both
companies and armies are organizationally designed for one purpose - to
fight, whether in the market or on the battlefield.
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010
Translating Strategy into action. The Balanced Scorecard.
The Balanced
Scorecard complements financial measures of past performance with measures
of the drivers of future performance. The objectives and measures of the
scorecard are derived from an organization's vision and strategy. The
objectives and measures view organizational performance from four
perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning
and growth. These four perspectives provide the framework for the Balanced
Scorecard.
Also
Your Gate To BSCThe Balanced Scorecard
Institute
SAS Balanced
Scorecard
What
is the Balanced Scorecard?
A Balancing Act:
a new article
on the implementation of the balanced scorecard
(893KB PDF file).
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011
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Management Strategy: Achieving Sustained
Competitive Advantage
Alfred A. Marcus, University of
Minnesota-Minneapolis
ISBN: 0072951877
Copyright year: 2005
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Online Learning Center
Management Strategy: Sustaining Competitive
Advantage, 1st edition, by Alfred Marcus, is a strategy book which
focuses on how making winning moves is dependent upon finding profitable
patterns that repeatedly meet customer demands for solutions. Where many
strategy books have lost sight of the purpose of strategy and fail to
show how decisions actually affect business performance and ultimately,
outcomes, Management Strategy focuses on the types of analyses the
industry, environment, and a company's internal resources require to
make effective strategic moves. In eight chapters, this textbook builds
upon the analysis process and demonstrates how strategy impacts an
organization's position in comparison to its competitors, both in terms
of the cost and quality of its products and the scope of businesses in
which it is involved (vertical and horizontal integration), as well as
its global versus domestic reach. The outcomes that come from analyzing
an organization also determine the extent to which the organization will
strive to be an innovator as opposed to being a follower.
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012
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Strategic Management, 10/e
John A. Pearce, II, Villanova University
Richard B. Robinson, Jr., University of South
Carolin
ISBN: 0073054224
Copyright year: 2007
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Online Learning Center
Contemporary research in strategic management,
with an emphasis on conceptual tools and skills created by scholars and
practitioners in the field are evident throughout this 11-chapter book.
Pearce and Robinson’s Formulation, Implementation and Control, 8e,
retains its high level of academic credibility and its market-leading
emphasis on Strategic Practice. The material presented here is the text
material that can be found in Strategic Management, 8e. It continues to
have strong support from longtime adopters and growing support in
schools with a desire to provide straightforward treatment of strategic
management with a practical, systematic approach. Pearce and Robinson
will continue to use a unique pedagogical model created by the authors
to provide logic and structure to its treatment of strategic management
which in turn makes the material more easily organized by the instructor
and learned by the student.
Chapter 2: Company Mission (752.0K)
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