Business Strategy

Introduction

There is a need for a strategy in every business to make it success. The strategies will depend on the business’s vision and objectives. From over the years, the needs for strategy is never been slow down and as many years came, there are new proposal of strategies that concerns with the innovation and evolution of the business.

The business’s life is guided by the goals. And these goals only make the business performance, even the individuals, making it move to reach for the thing that they dream of. These reasons are the foundation to create a step to have a thought in improving. The improvement could be in a form of innovation or organizational changes to reach the management perspective.

The Strategic Management Perspective

Strategic management requires managers to take an integrative view of the organization and assess how all of the functional areas and activities that fit together to help an organization achieve its goals and objectives. This cannot be accomplished if only the top managers in the organization take an integrative, strategic perspective of issues facing the firms and everyone else fends for themselves in their independent, isolated functional areas.

Marketing and sales will generally favor broad, tailor-made product lines, production will demand standardized products that are relatively easy to make in order to lower manufacturing costs, research and development will offer design products to demonstrate the technical elegance, and others. Instead, people throughout the organization need to be striving toward overall goals.

However, there is a four generic perspective brought and explained by Whittington (2002). This perspective are used in making a strategy to compete with the growing competitors in the industry that they belong.

The Four Generic Perspectives

The Classical Perspective – in a strategy, a rational process includes rational analysis and objective decision-making in order to maximize the long-term value. A good business planning requires a control in internal and external environment.

The Evolutionary Perspective – is a classical, rational and future oriented planning irrelevant. The strategy is a day-to-day management for surviving external circumstances. The dynamic hostile and competitive nature of markets makes it difficult to plan for a long-term survival.

The Processual Perspective – is where the future-planning business becomes irrelevant. Neither markets nor organizational processes are perfect enough for classical or evolutionary strategies to be adopted. The strategy is based on a pragmatic process of mistakes, learning and compromises. Here, people are too different when it comes to interest, knowledge, attention, rationality, and can therefore not agree on an optimal plan.

The Systematic Perspective – the other rational goals besides profit-maximization are professional pride, influence, patriotism, culture, and religion. Definition of strategy depends on contextual factors. The competition does not imply efficiency which markets can be manipulated. The society has other criteria for corporations than just profit-maximization. The strategic objectives depend on the specific social system in which the strategy is created.

Conclusions

As the basic idea in creating the business, it should also be concerned with the major concerns of the business. The customer needs like their tastes and preferences also revolves in the business cycle. To make it grow, the business should have a strong financial accountability, the right use of the financial necessities whether for expense or a part of saving and profit. The learning and growing perspective is through the hiring and selection where a good employee it employed. And the business process is involved should be improve to catch the quick run of technology era. The acquisition of new technologies needed strategies that are fit in the kind of machines purchased. The objective of the classical perspective is more on profit-maximization and focuses on the internal plans. Meanwhile, the evolutionary perspective’s objective is about the business’s survival and focuses in the external factors which is the market. Both the perspective can mark up the need for further organizational change is done wisely.

References:

Inception Pack (2007). What is Strategy? Vol. 3. [Online] Available at: http://theplanninglab.typepad.com/Inception_packs/TPL_Inception_Pack_vol_3.pdf [Accessed 02 Sept 2009].

Salisbury Public Works. (2005). Strategic Management Plan. [Online] Available at: http://www.ci.salisbury.md.us/publicworks/strategy/index.htm [Accessed 02 Sept 2009].

The Four Strategic Management Perspective. [Online] Available at: http://www.maaw.info/BalScoreSum.htm#1.%20Four%20Strategic%20Perspectives [Accessed 02 Sept 2009].

The Strategic Management Perspective: An Imperative throughout the Organization. Strategic Analysis [Online] Available at: http://www.mhhe.com/business/management/dess1e/pdfs/ch01.pdf [Accessed 02 Sept 2009].