CHAPTER 1 The Nature of Strategic Management

Introduction

1.
The underpinnings of strategic
management hinge on managers gaining an understanding of competitors, markets,
prices, suppliers, distributors, governments, creditors, shareholders and
customers worldwide.

What Is Strategic Management?

2.
Optimizing
for tomorrow the trends of today is the purpose of strategic management.

3.
Even
though useful, strategic planning has been cast aside by corporate America since
the early 1990s.

4.
Resource allocation is included
in strategy-formulation activities.

5.
The terms strategic management and strategy
implementation are synonymous.

6.
A vision statement is, in essence, a company’s game
plan.

7.
Strategy implementation is
often considered to be the most difficult stage in the strategic-management
process because it requires personal discipline, commitment and sacrifice.

8.
The final stage in strategic
management is strategy implementation.

9.
Strategy formulation,
implementation and evaluation activities occur at three hierarchical levels in
a large diversified organization: corporate, divisional and functional.

10.
One of the fundamental
strategy evaluation activities is reviewing external and internal factors that
are the bases for current strategies.

11.
An objective, logical,
systematic approach for making major decisions in an organization is a way to
describe the strategic-management process.

12.
Strategic management is an
attempt to organize qualitative and quantitative information in a way that
allows effective decisions to be made under conditions of uncertainty.

13.
Analytical and intuitive
thinking should complement each other.

14.
According to Albert Einstein,
“Knowledge is far more important than intuition.”

(f; difficult; p. 7)

Management by intuition can be defined as operating from the
“I’ve-already-made-up-my-mind-don’t-bother- me-with-the-facts mode.”