Success Through Effective Strategic Management

1 Basics of Strategy Management

1.1 What is Strategy

Strategy is a term that comes from the Greek “Strategia” which means generalship. In the military, strategy often refers to steering troops into position before the enemy is actually engaged. This concept was borrowed from the military and adopted in many organizations whereby a strategy is the pattern or plan that integrates an organization's major goals, policies, and action sequences into a cohesive whole.

1.2 What is Strategy Management

Strategy entered the management literature as a way of referring to entail attention to the objectives of organization in formulating the organization’s future mission in light of the changing external factors and in planning the resources deployment. Therefore, strategy management is a management’s game plan for

 Running the business

 Strengthening firm’s competitive position

 Satisfying customers

 Achieving performance targets

Generic Importance of Strategy and Strategy Management

“A well-formulated strategy helps to marshal and allocate an organization's resources into a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated changes in the environment, and contingent moves by intelligent opponents.” (James Brian Quinn3). All types of businesses require some sort of strategy in order to be successful; otherwise their efforts and resources will be spent haphazardly and likely wasted.

2 The Group Level Strategic Intent

The group level strategic intent is a vision for all strategic business units (SBU) to pursue. It highlights the approaches and commitment that all staff shall undertake.

Figure 5 – Strategic Intent of (my company) Group

Figure 5 above shows the strategic intent of the organization as a whole. The vision of focusing in high growth markets, such as Asia, Africa and Middle East, is the results of evaluating current and future global economic growth and market stability. Essentially, the approaches to the achievement of vision can be summarized into 4 Key Result Area (KRA) and they are Financial, Operation, People and Branding.

3 Strategic Goals of my department – the selected domain

To support the strategic growth of the organization, ABC formed as a technical systems delivery and support for the bank on demand and supply basis.

Figure 6 – The Five Pillars supporting the Strategic Intent of the Organization.

Figure 6 shows the strategic route of ABC to support the organization1. The goals, which refer as the Five Pillars, define the terms and conditions to follow the nature and direction of ABC.

3.1 Mind-Set of the Vision

Benjamin Tregoe and John Zimmerman4 defined strategy as “the framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization”. Therefore, the Five Pillars are by and large proactive in nature and they are formed based on the combinations of internal and external driving forces. Generically, the driving forces of the Five Pillars (modified from Michel Robert5) can be derived as:

 Product-service