Strategic management

Strategic management is the art, science and craft of formulating, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its objectives[1]. It is the process of specifying the organization’s mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the policies and plans, projects and programs. Strategic management seeks to coordinate and integrate the activities of the various functional areas of a business in order to achieve organizational objectives. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives.

Strategic management is the highest level of managerial activity. Strategies are typically planned, crafted or guided by the Chief Executive Officer, approved or authorized by the Board of directors, and then implemented under the supervision of the organization’s top management team or senior executives. Strategic management provides overall direction to the enterprise and is closely related to the field of Organization Studies. In the field of business administration it is useful to talk about “strategic alignment” between the organization and its environment or “strategic consistency” According to Arieu (2007), “there is strategic consistency when the actions of an organization are consistent with the expectations of management, and these in turn are with the market and the context.”

Prepare thoroughly if a review is coming up on any of your financing facilities

Banking relationships may have been quite cozy in recent years if your performance has been good and the banks have had a relaxed lending policy.

With the coming recession, your performance may dip sharply. I’ve told the story before but I was astonished how quickly profit disappeared in the early 90s recession.

My sources at the banks report that funds are still available so the credit crunch has not restricted availability but lending terms are likely to be tougher, both in terms of interest premiums and security requirements.

Since proper preparation prevents poor performance, if you put in the effort to demonstrate that your business remains worthy of bank support and your case remains strong, there should not be a problem.

However since a key bank criteria for lending is confidence in the management, poor preparation for the review meeting is likely to be damaging.

Budget for Online Marketing

As long as online looks and acts like some kind of ongoing experiment, it’s going to get that kind of attention and budget.  Seriously.  And the ongoing, repeated failures of the same ideas over and over does not help with this issue very much, know what I mean?  I know, I know, you think each generation is a new idea because it’s new technology.But these are not new ideas to Management, and they’re not ideas to Marketing.  They’re the same ideas with new technology, and each fails in the same way the others did.  So, why do we keep repeating these cycles  What is wrong with the transition from brilliant software development to sustainable business models