Why Strategic Management is Crucial in Today’s Business Environment
Ladies and gentlemen, today I welcome you to this business talk and hope that we are all gathered here as future business managers. One century ago, business was easy since resources were plenty and competition was scarce. Today, we are living in an exactly opposite world, where competition is high and resources depleting. This means that dinosaur business strategies are undergoing extinction and dying slowly. The modern era where managerial thinkers were trying to devise ways of increasing production was easier to do business unlike in the modern world where technology is high but competition is also high. Business giants like Digital Equipment and Wang Laboratories, Blockbuster and Motorola, Sears have either failed completely and are closing shop or they have been forced to rebrand thus losing market share. Where do you think these businesses went? They failed to evolve with changing business trends or it was just business going bad? In strategic management, business never goes bad but rather the decisions and options that a business takes can be lethal or successful. In my opinion, this should not have happened if the managers had strategic thought. This is because such companies failed to recognize the wave of strategic management and rebrand themselves for the future. The giant of strategic change trembled them down and up to today, they have never woke up.
The Business Intelligence Journal suggests that today managers are re-thinking management and looking at the organization from a different perspective to survive the current economic times. We grew up hearing some domestic names of companies that have today faded and no longer exists. The worst nightmare of any manager is closing shop because you cannot put up with the competition in the industry. Believe or not, your name enters the failure books of management and even your children and great grandchildren will be reading about you “the great failure of the century” or “the great scandal that rocked so and so company”. So what answer will you tell them when they ask what happened, will you say I was fired!, or the CEO was “was bad”, I bet you do not want to be in that position.
So today, only the strategic ones are surviving, companies like Samsung, Toyota, Google, and Microsoft are reviewing their business strategies every time to ensure that they meet the requirements of the new business environment. Strategic thinking is the new approach for increasing profits, creating competitive advantage and setting strategic direction. Therefore, the question we need to ask ourselves is will you survive as future strategic managers or not?
Characteristics of a Successful Strategic Manager
In an attempt to define strategic management, the strategic manager is the one who formulates and implements organizational goals on behalf of the owners. The process of new thinking in the organization for growth through the three distant points of strategy; acumen, allocation, and action.
Acumen is the inside of the organization where great projects and ideas come from. Business acumen is understanding the ways your business and the specific paths that have been taken to overcome challenges like competition and changing consumer trends. Strategic thinking allows the manager to understand and face the future by mapping and connecting the dots to achieve the intended outcome. For a strategic leader, the strategy is not static but rather a dynamic process to asses and adjust the circumstances that evolve in the business environment by understanding consumer needs and competitor abilities.
Allocation is the ability to focus resources time, talent and budget by making tradeoffs. In a business environment, the manager has to choose between one path and not the other. Great companies do this on a monthly and quarterly basis rather than yearly basis since the business environment keeps changing.
Action is the ability to stay focused on what is important for business. For every activity that takes place, there must be an action plan to ensure that the strategies that have been proposed are applied as required. Having a strategy without a proper action plan leads to challenges in executing the plan. Perhaps if we look at how Facebook and Google have grown, we can assume that the leaders have heard strategic action acumen for their organizations.
If we are talking about strategic management, then we have to look at the characteristics that make a strategic manager or leader that give them the ability to propel the organization to the next level. Successful organizations in the 21st century like Facebook, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft peg their success on the leadership efforts of one person in most cases the cofounder. This is because such leaders have the characteristics of passion, commitment, innovation, and judicious power. The first characteristics are passion and commitment, as mentioned above strategic thinking is a year-round process takes place every year.
The process of strategic thinking and leadership requires the commitment and passion of the leader in addressing the strategic issues that revolve around the organization. Another characteristic of a strategic manager is innovation coupled with practicality and realism. An eye for innovation and the vision to execute it by adjusting and adapting to the current business or economic environments. Do you think you have such abilities or characteristics? No, the look on your faces is obvious.
Developing Strategic Management Skills
In addition to that allocation of resources requires the judicious power skill by playing the power game skillfully and developing consent for the ideas that develop. This means that the leader is not supposed to have a narrow specialty but rather abundant skills in different areas that give them the ability to address organizational issues. This ability is supplemented by focus which allows the manager to pay channel attention and energy to the most important activities when allocating resources within the organization.
Therefore, Strategic management and thinking is the future of every business that needs to work. As future managers, you need to develop strategic management abilities that will see you become the transformers of the organizations that you will work with.
As you leave here, you need to leave as a strategic manager, you need to understand the abilities and attitudes that you need to work on to survive the business challenges that exist. Go and look for the characteristics of the successful leaders of the organizations we have talked and benchmark yourself with them. Then ask yourself the following question “if you were the founder of these organizations, do you think you have what it takes to propel them to this level. If your answer is a big NO, then you need to do a SWOT analysis of yourself and decide which direction you will take in the future. This will assist one day when you will be given a strategic unit in an organization to lead. Therefore, your food for thought is are you a strategic manager, do you have strategic skills and can you work yourself out to become a strategic leader that your organization can rely on?
The speaker used several public speaking strategies to convey the message and reach out to the audience. One way that the speaker achieved this is through applying the Grice Maxim. The maxim guides the speaker in developing speech that meets the requirements of the topic and the audience. According to Cameron (2001, p. 11), this maxim requires the speaker to organize information in a way that allows the listeners to get the right information. This means that the language used and the structure of the speech must reflect the competence levels of the audience rather than making it too simple or complicated. If it is too simplified then it becomes boring and if it too complicated then the jargons make it difficult for the audience to follow. To do this, the cooperation principle was used to ensure that the speech meets the requirements of the audience (Kayed & Kitishat 2015, p. 46). For example, in the beginning, the speaker draws the attention of the listener to the topic to make them appreciate the need to listen to the speech and develop strategic thinking skills. This is the reason why the speaker does not start by defining strategic management but rather slowly applies the maxim of cooperation by revolving around the issue of strategic management.
Evaluation of Speech
According to Jwalapuram (2017, p. 19) in public speaking examples are used to make the audience undertand and relate the contents of the speech to the realworld. As the speech continues the magnitude of the speech is understood by the student when real life examples are used. In the speech, examples are used to bring the audience to the reality of the situation and make them understand what is happening around them. In most cases, people see, here or watch things happen but they can sometimes lack the ability to understand the reasons for such actions. For example, when companies fall, people move on because another brand name replaces the one that they were used to and with time the other name fades. Therefore, examples reflect the real-life situations and bring reality closer to the audience. In the speech real-life examples of organizations that have failed and those have succeeded is used to make the audience understand what it means by failed business strategies.
Further, symbolism is also used to illustrate the magnitude of the situation and the changes that took place in the industry (Eagleton 2008, p. 14). When the speaker refers to strategic change as the giant that trembled down the business examples that failed to adapt to pressure. The listener is made to understand that the need for strategic change is a business insurance that cushions the organization against any pressure that comes from industry competition. Because businesses keep competing, only those that have strategized can survive and those that fail, fall directly under the feet of the giant which makes it difficult for them to rise again.
The speaker also applied Kipling questioning to call for the attention of the audience.in public speaking, if the speaker does not organize the presentation, then it can appear like a church sermon where the audience is supposed to listen from the beginning to the end (Verdonk 2012, p. 8). This type of questioning allows the speaker to use rhetorical questioning to allow the audience to contemplate what they could have done if they were in such a situation. The Kipling method contains six questioning type that allows the speaker to question the audience in a way that makes them understand the content of the speech (Bimrose, et al. 2007, p. 11). Rhetoric questioning emphasizes the points that have been presented and lures the audience to have questions in their mind. As they contemplate on the questions, they analyze and understand the contents of the whole speech thus making it easy to understand what the speaker is presenting. This is seen in the use of who, what, why, and how to illustrate the state of affairs. Further, assumptive questioning is used by the speaker when he says “what could you have done if you were the manager?” this questioning also draws the attention of the audience and further applies negative assertion to persuade the listener with the story.
The speaker also applies argumentative patterns of speech to indicate the different moves contained in the speech. Argumentative moves are used to solve any communication differences between the audience and the speaker (Van-Eemeren, et al., 2007, p. 2). For example, the words “in my opinion” have been used to give a contrary opinion of the speaker to imply that what happened to the companies that failed was not expected and it could have happened. Thus the speaker uses externalization to disagree with what happened or the state of affairs. Dallacqua (2012, p. 369) suggests that tThis allows the audience to make the decision of either developing strategic thinking skills or falling to the same condition that the companies that failed to adapt are facing.
Lastly, storytelling has been used in the speech to illustrate the concepts more to the audience. Although the speech appears like a talk, the speaker used the logical level of storytelling to contextualize the environment where the information is applied. The whole story takes place in a management environment where management abilities are analyzed to determine their importance (Vaishnav 2014, p. 24; Dilts 2014, pp. 5). The speech has been designed within the belief level where the speaker is both questioning what has been happening and at the same time analyzing what needs to be done for leaders to strategically manage organizations. The speech ends in spirituality level where the speaker requests the audience to horn their skills and prepare for the burden of strategically managing their organizations and ensuring that they survive.
References
ABimrose J. et al. 2007. Skills diagnostics and screening tools: A literature review, s.l.: Department for Work and Pensions.
Cameron D 2001. Working with Spoken Discourse.. London: Sage Publications.
Dallacqua AK 2012. Exploring Literary Devices in Graphic Novels. Language Arts,, 89(6), pp. 365-378.
Dilts R 2014. A Brief History of Logical Levels, s.l.: s.n.
Eagleton T 2008. Literary theory: an introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Jwalapuram P 2017. Evaluating Dialogs based on Grice’s Maxims. s.l., s.n., pp. 17-24.
Kayed MA & Kitishat A 2015. The Violation of the Grice’s Maxims in Jordanian newspapers’ cartoons: a Pragmatic Study. International Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 4(4), pp. 41-50.
Van Eemeren FH, Houtlosser P. & Snoeck Henkemans, A. F. “., 2007. cal Profiles and Indicators of Argumentative Moves. s.l., s.n.
Vaishnav, H., 2014. Tools and Techniques for Effective Communication Skills. Linguistics and Literature Studies, 4(1), pp. 23-26.
Verdonk, P., 2012. Stylistics. New York: Oxford Uiversity Press.
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