Planned Strategy And The Environment example essay topic

Role of strategic management in an Organization In an organization or a company, a manager should develop strategic plans to enable a company to implement successfully its short and long-term business plans. Strategy is the determination of the basis long-term goals and objectives of an enterprises / company and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals... It involves determination and reveals of a company purpose in terms of long-term objectives, actions programmes and resources priorities... It selects the business in which the company is in or trying to be in... It enables consistency long-term achievement of the business by responding to opportunities and threats in environment. The environment consists of all other surrounding in which the company operate.

The strategic manager should develop the strategic, which is relevant to its external environment. In order to fit the external environment, the manager should develop appropriate internal strategies, which will enable him / her to understand his / her organization strength and weakness to enable to focus on external environment. In internal environment, the manager should look inward and evaluate the company capability in term of skills and competence, human resources present in the organization etc. My main concentration will be on external environment. External environment analysis will enable strategic manager to identify opportunity and threats which are available and facing a company example new business, new market share / segment, these included the below listed and discussed; The Economic factors will consist of declining recession or boom of the business etc. the availability of credit facility to the company and the cost of credit, level of disposable income to expected consumer / customer, the propensity of population to consume is the focus and evaluate tendencies of consumer to consumer company's products and services, prime interest rate for expansion of business, taxation system, currency exchange rates, international economic trends (balance of payment), GNP etc, all this will enable strategic manager to develop a strategy which will be able to sustain the economic trends for the specified plan period of the organization. Social cultural is another external factor, which will influence a company's strategy.

A good strategic manager should be able to measure values and attitude of the society in which the company exists and would be customers, life style of the population mix in which he / she aims the market strategy, segment, composition of work force and work ethnic which to get enough and qualified workers and whether they are ready or allowed by their ethnic to demographic character of the population, example age, sex, etc. The religions aspiration is another external factor, which has to be considered before entering the market; For example a manager with a pork farm should never target or agree with a strategy to market its product in an Islamic region or country. It is the job of strategic manager to compare the planned strategy and the environment in which he / she is aiming in terms of religion and believes otherwise the plan will fail hence the organization. The organization should also consider political environment of a country and even for the super power countries which will affect the company's decision either direct or indirect, in domestic politics the strategic manager should understand what policies in term of state and local registrations, rules governs business taxes, distribution, quality of the product, pressures groups such as trade unions. The political ideology of the government what policies which forms basis of political and economic theories, is it socialism or capitalism? Open or closed economy?

The political attitudes towards the industry affects the strategy, is it a local manufacturers favored by politics or regarded same foreign industry? The demographic environment includes the study of human population in term of size, density, location, age, profession and other statistics. The strategic manager should be able to evaluate demographic factors and to match the strategic market or product development plans with the demography of would be consumer e.g. consider a strategy of producing or marketing a baby clothes; the strategic manager should analyze the size of market in term of age, number of a new born per month. Likewise a strategy to market body cosmetics will need demographic analysis in term of sex, how many women especially between 14 - 60 years mighty be available at each strategic plan period etc. The technological environment is certain the most dynamic force affecting company's activities when making a strategy, a manger should consider present and expected scientific discoveries on how are they going to affect your strategy. Technology and technological development influences the product, lines product mix of a company.

With new technology in form of machinery apparatus equipment, tools and raw material. The ever changing of technology leads into technological innovation and invention, all these affects or changes procedure and processes, increases efficiency and productivity, develop new and cheap raw material and final products which will be more attractive to customers. All these may make the product of a company economically and technically absolute as it is the job of strategic manager to focus and foresee all these and find a balance or compromise between company's strategic plans and the expected technological advantage and make his / her company's strategies in effective. What are expected technological development of the substitute industries will your strategy be able to over come and survive in the market? The technological development in industry in general should be looked in depth before developing strategies, strategies should be able to consider and include the present and future technological development in the industries. The above basic factors are constitutes of opportunity and threats, the external environment is not static it is turbulent.

The critical responsibility of manager is to identify future opportunities available and threats to the organization. The major problem is that manager is faced with ever changing environment factors that affect the adopted strategy. The manger can do the following in order to grab some opportunities: . The manager should be able to try focusing on critical environment factors, which are significant favorable or unfavorable. Identifying the critical environment factors, Monitor the changes that appear in the critical environment factors to know whether the threats are short term or long term and should be able to forecast cumulative impact on the industry characteristics of critical environment factors characters... Other External environment includes elements like nature of and degree of competition, the strategic manager should analyze and understand this in order to enter and win the competition / competitors.

.. Barrier to entry - the strategic manager should be able to forecast external barriers for entrance in the market therefore to find ways to overcome them... The competitive power of the substitute, the strategic manager should forecast and analyze all product substitute so that becomes competitive than substitute, this can be done by developing a new niche / segment. .. The strategic manager should balance or dilute the buyer power; he / she has a job to analyze how many and how much power the buyer posses and their control over the price include types of distribution channels. He / she should find a way to dilute the suppliers power if seems to be big and affects his production cost hence selling prices.

According to the explanation above, we have noted that, since the organization is a part of a system theory, and that there is no system of its own and that it is operates with other super and supra systems, it therefore operate in the environment. The environment is turbulent and not static, the external environment is ever changing and requires new and different approaches in every time otherwise the organization will be left behind and eventually dies. The external environment tends to affect daily operation of the organization therefore a strategic manager need to balance between the organization strategy and the external surrounding or environment in which it operates; By doing so the chance of success by enabling opportunity will be enhanced, weakness and threats will be minimized, hence the survival and development of the organization in this turbulent environment.

Bibliography

; 1: G.A. Cole, strategic Management Theory and Practice 2nd Edition. 2: A. Thomason, JR and A.J. Strickland, Strategic Management, concept and cases, 13 edition. 3: Kotler, Armstrong Principle of Marketing, 9th Edition.