Organizations incorporate various strategic management concepts and strategic management processes in their operations. Strategic management enables top managers to make decisions that affect the long-term profitability and sustainability of organizations. Firstly, the process involves large-scale mobilization of resources to develop competencies and capabilities for the future. Strategic management processes take care of long-term risks to deal with uncertainties in the business environment. Top managers set objectives, formulate, and implement strategies. In all the history of strategic management, leaders try to make decisions that affect their followers. In business, organizations analyze the particular industries in which they operate. This, therefore, includes analyses of external and internal environmental factors.
strategic management concepts and strategic management processes
MANAGING COMPLEXITY IN STRATEGY
The process of putting strategic management concepts together to develop a good strategy is quite challenging and complicated. It involves some level of forecasting to predict possible outcomes of certain decisions. Therefore, the uncertainty of the future makes strategic management processes complicated, and top managers must understand the concept of emergence. This is where the interconnected aspects of strategic management in business evolve in ways that produce specific trends. By studying the history of strategic management, managers learn that its complexity is due to three particular reasons. Lastly, they are the uncertainty of the future, differences in managers’ priorities, and resistance to change due to strategy implementation.
managing complexity in strategy
THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
We can trace the history of strategic management back to the Old Testament of the Bible. It was when Moses had to come up with a strategy for his people after freeing them from Egypt. He was the lone strategist and faced a difficult decision. Also, Sun Tzu of China developed several strategic management concepts that many managers and military institutions study carefully. Additionally, Sun Tzu emphasized the creative and deceptive aspects of strategy. One of Sun Tzu’s ideas that has numerous business applications is that winning a battle without fighting is the best way to win. Over time, leaders use these concepts to develop strategic management processes that favor their operations. Lastly, in ancient times, the Greeks used the ‘Trojan Horse’ idea to incorporate a strategy that uses deception.
history and development of strategic management