Worcestershire Country Council (Question 2)
In ensuring a company remains competitive and continues to make prudent executive decisions, it must address the economic challenges it faces. Strategic management encompasses this holistic style of leadership in which the company’s goals and objectives are all integrated into a cohesive entity. This entity can be likened to the market in which the company operates. Many past successful organizations have felt the impact of changes in demands, cultures, tastes, unemployment, competition, customers and so on in plummeting sales revenue. Reason being, they used a cookie cutter approach to solving the problem. The ability to understand, track, prepare and adapt to changing times makes the difference between a company that barely survives and one that is a successful survivor.
The strategic management process involves two key components in ensuring a company remains current and competitive in this dynamic environment; strategy formulation and strategy implementation. The former refers to an examination of a company’s mission and goals, internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. This is commonly referred to as SWOT- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. After this a strategic review of varying alternatives against the company’s ability to achieve them based on its SWOT is conducted and the most attainable is selected.
Strategy implementation looks at allocating resources to support the strategy formulation decision made. Management must ensure that any decision taken to move a company forward is backed by structuring the organization to complement the new thrust. For example, the technological support, raw material acquisition and having the right employees with the right skills, experience and training to ensure plans materialize.
Human resource (HR) managers face the