Notable Quotes on Strategic Management

"If we know where we are and something about how we got there, we might see where we are trending—and if the outcomes which lie naturally in our course are unacceptable, to make timely change."   —Abraham Lincoln

"Without a strategy, an organization is like a ship without a rudder, going around in circles. It’s like a tramp; it has no place to go."  —Joel Ross and Michael Kami

"Plans are less important than planning." —Dale McConkey

"The formulation of strategy can develop competitive advantage only to the extent that the process can give meaning to workers in the trenches." —David Hurst

"Most of us fear change. Even when our minds say change is normal, our stomachs quiver at the prospect. But for strategists and managers today, there is no choice but to change." —Robert Waterman Jr.

"If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand. He who will not worry about what is far off will soon find something worse than worry." —Confucius

Welcome Friends !!!

Welcome to strategic management. 

This is a challenging and exciting capstone course that will allow you to function as the owner or chief executive officer of different organizations. Your major task in this course will be to make strategic decisions and to justify those decisions through oral and written communication. Strategic decisions determine the future direction and competitive position of an enterprise for a long time. Decisions to expand geographically or to diversify are examples of strategic decisions. 

Strategic decision-making occurs in all types and sizes of organizations, from Exxon and IBM to a small hardware store or small college. Many people’s lives and jobs are affected by strategic decisions, so the stakes are very high. An organization’s very survival is often at stake. The overall importance of strategic decisions makes this course especially exciting and challenging. You will be called upon in this course to demonstrate how your strategic decisions could be successfully implemented. 

 

In this blog, you can look forward to making strategic decisions both as an individual and as a member of a team. No matter how hard employees work, an organization is in real trouble if strategic decisions are not made effectively. Doing the right things (effectiveness) is more important than doing things right (efficiency). For example, many American newspapers are faltering as consumers increasingly switch to interactive media for news.
 

You will have the opportunity in this blog to make actual strategic decisions, perhaps for the first time in your academic career. Do not hesitate to take a stand and defend specific strategies that you determine to be the best, based on tools and concepts in this textbook. The rationale for your strategic decisions will be more important than the actual decision, because no one knows for sure what the best strategy is for a particular organization at a given point in time. This fact accents the subjective, contingency nature of the strategic-management process.

Use the concepts and tools presented in this text, coupled with your own intuition, to recommend strategies that you can defend as being most appropriate for the organizations that you study. You will also need to integrate knowledge acquired in previous business courses. For this reason, strategic management is often called a capstone course; you may want to keep this book for your personal library.

A trademark of this text is its practitioner and applications orientation. This book presents techniques and content that will enable you to actually formulate, implement, and evaluate strategies in all kinds of profit and nonprofit organizations. The end-of-chapter Assurance of Learning Exercises allow you to apply what you’ve read in each chapter to the new McDonald’s Cohesion Case and to your own university.

Work hard in this course and have fun. Good luck !!!