Strategic Management

Abstract

This book is concerned with strategic management and the strategic management process. Determining the strategy of an organisaton is only one of the functions of management. It is, however, arguably the most significant area of management decision-making, and the most important one in which to make the right decisions. Management is defined in one text as ‘the process of planning, organizing, leading and controlling the efforts of organization members and of using all other organizational resources to achieve stated organizational goals’.¹ Strategic management decisions in fact precede all of the management functions above. Indeed, in the absence of strategic management decisions none of the above management functions can be carried out.

The story of any great industrial enterprise is full of interest. All the elements of high adventure are contained in it — the vision of some distant goal to be won, the planning of the expedition, the struggle against human inertia and material difficulties, the freaks of luck, the triumphs and the reverses, and in the end the glory of achievement, greater perhaps than the vision of the pioneer. — A. G. Whyte, Introduction to Forty Years of Electrical Progress (London: Ernest Benn, 1930).