Business Organisation and Policy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Business Organisation and Policy - Essay Example Strategic management has commonly been portrayed as revolving around the discrete phases of formulation, implementation, and control, carried out in almost cascading steps (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel, 2008). These are three steps of the planned corporate approach to strategy involves a formal process to strategy formation: problem awareness, the development of solutions and the selection of a solution (Forbes and Fletcher, 2006). In the same context, Marlo (2006) denoted a planned corporate strategy comprising of a declaration of specific and expressed intentions, supported with formal controls. Jauch and Osborn (2006) commented with his realization that towards a successful outcome of the strategy, a firm structure is necessary for an organization. Hence all decisions made from the top management can be carried out throughout the organization, with the "people" convinced and act in ways that are expected to create desirable results ad hoc to the plan. Therefore, strategy-making authority rests with top management, committing a centralized power in an organization. In view of the forward looking nature of a planned corporate strategy, Mazzolini (2008) observed that goals or objective fulfillments are the critical outcome of the strategy. In a foresight, Snow and Hambrick (2007) notes that the planned co... Harrison and Philips (2006) found out that a planned corporate strategy is often billed as a future oriented activity, merely projecting the recent past into the future. Through this process, it carries out operational planning, project planning and strategic planning constantly, making sure that top management holds the influence and control for the undertaking in the future. The basic concept behind planned corporate strategy is just exactly what the name implies meaning that it is planned corporate therefore at best a guess/forecast which then is the basis for any type of decision making. Typically, organisations will "plan"/forecast variables that they foresee that will have an future impact on their business, so they anticipate certain events to occur in the future, and as a result of this anticipation they design and implement a strategy to effectively allocate the proper resources in place to either minimise or maximise respectively the negative or positive effects of the event. In essence, it allows an organization to "see the bigger picture" of the challenges and opportunities ahead of them. Any form of planned corporate strategy will contain some element of contingency planning, though not much, but these contingencies are not the focal point of planned corporate strategy. Opponents of this type of strategy believe that this strategy is at best a guess, which could be totally wrong. An example of such a strategy failing was the lack of business planners to adequately factor "terrorism issues" in their business planning, The business planners in the airline industry were hit the hardest during 9/11, as their planned corporate strategy had no contingency to