Anyone can find this question when reading a book or article about strategy and strategic management. However, the answer usually starts with; there is no fixed definition for strategy and strategic management, and they can vary based on many criteria such as time, field, the purpose of using the definitions, to whom it will communicate, and by whom it will be delivered. When looking for the originality of strategy, we can find that it came from the army, and it is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the art of planning operations in war, especially of the movements of armies and navies into favorable positions for fighting”. It is clear from this definition that strategy is mainly concerned with planning with minimum risk to win something in the future such as the war.
An army will decide the destiny of a whole country and its people while using the word strategy on the corporate level can give the same importance to it and how it can affect the future of any corporation or for companies in some cases “to be or not to be”.
This leads to defining strategy as a series of actions linked together that managers take to improve their company’s efficiency. By improving the company’s efficiency, managers can achieve their targets and the company can win the competition with their rivals which in the end will create sustainability for the business and secure the employee’s income.
From another perspective and when the strategy is linked to the organization, Strategy will not be effective unless it is turned to actions, and this is the main concern of strategic management which focuses on the transfer of all theoretical meanings of strategy into activities. Strategic management (SM) can lead any organization either to success or failure; SM is the most interesting of the management disciplines.
Strategic management is further divided into two main categories.
These two categories include the formulation of a strategy and the implementation of that particular. Strategic management is focusing on three areas for any organization: the first area is the understanding of the strategic position for the organization, the second is to know what are the strategic choices for the organization in the future, and the third is how to turn the strategy into actions.
This means that strategic management is mainly concerned with how to make the right decision at the right time in order to achieve the long and soft-term goals for an organization with the lowest expenses and highest quality.
Implementation of strategic management can measure the performance of an organization and indicates the level of influence of this implementation on the result from the organization. However, there is a strong relationship between the responses of the people working in the organization to the strategic management instructions and the challenges they are facing.
