Advantages of Strategic Management A couple of definitions on STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT Strategic management involves formulation and implementation of the major goals and plans taken by a company’s top management on behalf of owners, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization competes. The methodical analysis of the factors associated with customers and competitors (the external environment) and the organization itself (the internal environment) to provide the basis for maintaining optimum management practices is another well known definition.  The objective of strategic management is to achieve better alignment of corporate policies and strategic priorities. Advantages: 1. Discharges Responsibility The process of strategy formulation satisfies the expectation from shareholders, stakeholders and the general public at large, that a strategically managed organization will discharge its duties successfully. 2. Allows an Objective Assessment Strategic management provides a CONTROL that allows the senior management team to take a step back from the day-to-day business and CONTEMPLATE  about the future of the organization. 3. Faciliatates to Make Wise Business Decisions Strategy provides the framework within which EXECUTIVES at lower and middle levels can make day-to-day operational decisions that are aligned with the accomplishment of the organization’s goals. 4. Enables Understanding and Improves co-ordination between different departments Allowing participation in the strategic management process enables better understanding of the direction, why that direction was chosen, and the associated benefits. Good strategy formulation and communication process are vital steps in enabling effective and efficient strategy deployment. 5. Simplifies Measurement of Progress Strategy sets the direction and empowers an organization to bring into line its objectives and performance measures. These objectives and performance measures allow meaningful information to be provided to decision-makers regarding the organization’s progress through such tools as scorecards and dashboards. 6. Enhances Strategic Agility (Innovation) When a firm can successfully capitalize upon opportunities resulting from unanticipated and significant change, it is said to be innovative as it has a competitive edge over other firms. 7. Ensures Allocation of Resources: The limited resource is properly allocated to different functional levels so as to create value for all stakeholders. A targeted approach to markets and opportunities obviously strengthens your bottom line. A simple representation will make your understanding better: Enhanced Communication DIALOGUE PARTICIPATION | | Deeper/Improved Understanding OF OTHER’S VIEW OF WHAT THE FIRM IS DOING  | | Greater Commitment TO ACHIEVE OBJECTIVES TO IMPLEMENT STRATEGIES TO WORK HARD | | The Result ALL MANAGERS AND EMPLOYEES ON A SINGLE MISSION TO HELP FIRM SUCCEED...

Top 50 Quotes from Peter Drucker Peter Drucker is known as the father of modern management. A prolific writer, business consultant and lecturer, he introduced (rather re-invented) many management concepts that have been embraced by corporates all over the world. TOP 50 MARKETING AND SALES QUOTES This modern “Managementguru” has delivered timeless and time-tested ideas on management, leadership, change, education, motivation, marketing and what-not. A lot of companies are successfully functioning based on Peter Drucker’s management concepts. What follows is a compilation of Peter Drucker’s sayings and messages to the management fraternity. His open and result-driven thought process is what attracts me the most. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.” “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” “What gets measured gets improved.” “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.” “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” “Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.” “Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.” “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things” “The best way to predict your future is to create it” “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” “Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. “ “A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge. “ “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself.” “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.” “Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t. “Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a...

#Startup Quotes for Starters is an interesting compilation of the innumerable quotes strewn over the internet especially for the starters. It is always better to follow the foot steps of successful people because they would be the “Enlightened Masters” of the challenges and hurdles on the road to success. #Startups has become a “Buzz Word” in the business environment and the very word “startup” can get your tweets more favorited. The very purpose of a startup is to bring an innovative idea into reality- be it a tech or a service based startup. I hope to inspire the fresh set of startup #entrepreneurs with the following quotes right from Thomas Alva Edison to #Larry Page. Get Inspired and Keep Going… 1. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – #Mark Twain 2. “When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.” – Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder 3. “If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.” –Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder 4. “There’s lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.” –Phil Libin, Evernote CEO 5. “User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.”–Evan Williams, Co-Founder, Twitter 6. “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  –Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 7. “What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.”  –Dave Thomas, Founder, Wendy’s 8. “Don’t take too much advice. Most people who have a lot of advice to give — with a few exceptions — generalize whatever they did. Don’t over-analyze everything.  I myself have been guilty of over-thinking problems. Just build things and find out if they work.” – Ben Silbermann, Pinterest founder 9. “We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.” – Pete Cashmore, Mashable founder and CEO 10. “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”  –Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO 11. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”  –Steve Jobs, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple 12. “No matter how brilliant your mind or #strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” –Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder 13. “If you take a good idea and great execution, you will get much farther than taking a great idea with poor execution.” – Rohini Chakravarthy, Inksedge 14. “Invest in startups. Your college network can be very effective in finding them.” – Ankit Gupta, Pulse 15. “As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.” – Ben Horowitz,Co founder, Opsware 16. “Best startups generally come...

Strategic Change-Beyond the Boxes   The major focus of corporate strategy is to formulate a method by which any business can adapt to a changing environment enabling to improve its competitive advantage. The corporate strategy theory presents us with the following questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How do we get there?   Corporate Self-Analysis The logic is to examine the current status of the business. Areas that come under this self-analysis purview include: Is the business aware of who its stake-holders are? If you are not going to engage your customers or users, then your business becomes product-centric and not cutomer-centric. What are the long-term objectives of your concern? Without a definitive vision how will you ever design and achieve your short-term goals! Does your company have a mission statement? See the mission statement of Mc.Donalds – McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favorite place and way to eat and drink. Our worldwide operations are aligned around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an exceptional customer experience – People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion. What are your present business strategies? If your company’s presence is not felt in the market (forget being a market leader always, though that would be the dream spot of all big corporate companies), or your product is not selling by itself, then there has some serious thinking to be done about your present strategies.     Focus on what went wrong, try to get inspired by your competitors’ moves (Ha! Its not copying my friend! ), gear up your advertising department to reach the audience. Also try to find out if there are any black sheep in your stay leaking confidential statistics and strategic business moves. Are they simple to understand and communicate to the workforce? If you are not able to pitch your idea to your workforce in a matter of just 15 minutes, then it is very well clear that you are not clear about what you’ve conceptualized. What is the marketplace scenario? Is it in the growth/decline phase? Sometimes it is better to start a business at bad times. Hiring will be easy, cost will be under control and you can experiment boldly because you have nothing to lose. Who might be your biggest competitors? This takes serious effort and planning and ask your core team to do their home-work properly. “Understand that a competitor is created because you are weak”. Review your business internally, look at your business-does it support growth and adaptability to change? This depends upon the leader who serves as the biggest inspiration for people down the line. The culture he has developed plays a big role in deciding this aspect wherein flexibility and employee engagement are part and parcel of it. How effective are your production processes? How well do sales/personnel/marketing/finance sections perform? How well does the business control its internal resources? This is a separate entity and the most crucial element of an enterprise. Expansion in accordance with the demand on one side and keeping up with the technology advance on the other side and what about the third side – the “WORKFORCE” in caps! Tending to the employee morale is the biggest challenge of modern times. HR MANAGERS have to have up-to-date knowledge on the labor laws and government policies on the security aspects of employees. A small case study on the Fast Food Giant McDonalds: U.S. CMO Deborah Wahl, who joined the fast food giant McDonalds company in early 2014, said in a video about the brand refresh that the company will move from a philosophy of “billions served” —...

Does Your Company Have What It Takes to be A Leader? Corporations that are considered leaders in terms of business performance take a common approach to CSR. The blueprint for how corporations can maximize their investments in CSR contain five essential ingredients- Business-based social purposeClear theory of changeQuality and depth of informationConcentrated effort, andPartnering with experts. 1. Business-based social purpose: There have been too many examples of CSR programs that ignore business fundamentals. Leadership-level CSR programs always directly reflect what the business is and what it does. An “innovative CSR initiative” can emphasize the company’s business purpose and flawlessly leverage its operational competencies. The social purpose of a business is aligned with and supports social issues in a way that is consistent with the unique culture and character of the business. Srinivasan Services Trust is a social arm of Sundaram Clayton Limited and TVS Motor company established in 1996 for charitable purposes. The company focuses on improving health, education, women’s empowerment, infrastructure and environment that would bring about changes in the lives of people in a community. 2. Clear theory of change: CSR is becoming indispensable. On the one hand, that’s good news because it proves its business value. On the other hand, it’s getting harder to discriminate one company’s efforts from another’s. CSR leaders develop branded approaches to drive measurable social change. Starbucks Coffee has 8,000 stores, in 34 countries that sell to 30 million customers each week has adopted an unique CSR approach. Their mission is to provide the highest quality coffee in an environment that is consistent worldwide and support the sustainability of their farmers. Starbucks could be considered compliant and even proactive in their responsibilities to stakeholders. They purchase coffee in 20-30 countries per year, as their buying agents spend 240/365 days per year on the road searching for the best coffee farms and developing relationships with customers. It involves mutually agreed upon fair pricing, economic transparency, socially responsible buying, and environmentally friendly expectations. These standards protect the farmer’s business and ensure that Starbucks can support their ethical branding with practices that respect the environment. 3. Quality and Depth of Information: Merely pin-pointing social priorities for community investment is not adequate. Leadership comes from providing employees, customers and external stakeholders with a significant depth of information about the social issue through authentic research, white papers, videos, stories, social media, and so on. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Gates Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the world, founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and is said to be the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. Guided by the belief that ‘all lives have equal value’, Bill Gates and his wife  Melinda Gates the co-chairs explain about their work and their commitment in supporting the government in reaching India’s most vulnerable communities with the services they need to live healthy and productive lives. The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) under the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Government of India and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) launched a call for proposals as part of Grand Challenges India to reinvent the toilet. The Department of Biotechnology and the Gates Foundation will each invest US$1 million to support Indian investigators to drive research, development, and production of the “next generation toilet.” 4. Concentrated effort: Leadership is shown by corporations that direct their efforts on one social issue and align all their internal and external resources with this issue. 5. Partnering With Experts: Leadership entails showing a high degree of credibility. This is best done through relationships with social issue experts and not-for-profit organizations. Starbucks hosted...