Post For week 8

Post for week 8

This week we looked at organisations and their different strategies. What is strategy? There is no specific definition of strategy, there are just different ways to which you could view strategy. According to Henry Mintzberg(1972) strategy could be defined as “a pattern in a stream of decisions”. Chandler (1963) describes strategy as “the determination of the long run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals”. While Johnson and Scholes (2011) describes it as “the long term direction of an organisation”. But generally, strategy is about how people decide to organise major resources to enhance the performance of an enterprise. The difference in these definitions differ mainly because of what context the person defining it was looking at. There are different levels of strategy, the operational level, which is how an organisation delivers in terms of resources, processes and people, then there is business level, which looks at how individual business units compete in their particular markets. Finally there is the corporate level, this looks at the overall scope of the organisation.   

What are the processes involved when forming strategy?

Firstly you have to look at who actually forms the strategy, strategy is typically the responsibility of senior management. But some believe that in conditions of rapid change enabling more people to contribute will improve the result. How is strategy developed? There is a shift from formal planning processes to informal conversations between managers, then there is less forecasting and more scenario planning, there is less documentation, the timespans are shorter, there is more flexibility in the plan meaning some small changes could be made and then more emphasis would be placed on specific targets.

What ways could an organisation form its strategy?

A SWOT analysis Can help managers find the fit between internal capabilities and external changes/ opportunities. What is a SWOT analysis? This is an organisations strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for example Apples strengths could be its brand loyalty, its weaknesses could be its high prices, its opportunities could be its advances in technology and its threats could be the progression of Samsung. A SWOT analysis is probably the main tool a manager should be using when forming strategy. There  could also be the use of Ansoff’s Matrix

, which would make it easy for a manager to see how to strategize or a manager could also make use of Porter’s generic strategies.

In conclusion, strategy is always key in order for a business to be able to move forward, the right strategies would lead to the right outcomes, for example because of Nokia’s poor strategic decisions, it has led to the fall of one of the largest mobile phone companies in the world. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23947212

Henry Mintzberg on Emergent Strategies -  http://www.forbes.com/sites/karlmoore/2011/06/21/emergent-strategy-demands-emergent-learning/