Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren’t Strategic, or Even Plans - Article Review

This week’s articles exemplified the importance of strategic management and strategy formulation. In essence, a strategy is something that must be planned and designed accordingly to assess and counter risks, and efficiently and effectively utilize all resources. These actions must all be done in somewhat of a collective manner in order to achieve a shared and meaningful purpose within an organization or team. One of the articles I found very interesting was the article by Graham Kenny, titled “Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren’t Strategic, or Even Plans”. The article illustrates the idea of how often the word strategy itself is actually misunderstood, even by managers of larger companies. The author of the article states that strategy actually takes place between an objective, which is what you are trying to achieve, and the action, which takes place at the individual level and is something that is done daily. From a public perception, you would think that most managers truly know what goes into making a proper strategy, yet most don’t even know the proper definition

I found this article extremely intriguing because it was cool seeing an author’s perspective that strategy is an inanimate object that cannot be felt by management, taking place at the organizational level. Essentially, strategy is how you plan to position yourself against your competition. The differences and misunderstandings of the true meanings of actions, objectives, and strategies are more prevalent than I had thought prior. Reading this article has made me question whether or not the management team within my careers in the past understood the correct meaning, and if or if not it was the reason for certain ambiguous and poor results of output that occurred. This article as a whole is a good reminder to continually assess not only the organizational culture of your current place of work, but to evaluate the entire system design of your workplace.