The corporate strategy is the means in which the organisation sustains and achieves success. Still, it hardly rises to this level, in spite of many corporate strategies theory & significant research from different organisations over past some decades. Changes over years are actually considered in a form of the small and theoretical refinements, instead large & significant steps needed for more management transition. What explains relative failure of many organisations to make effective strategy? The part of this problem is that the corporations and managers have huge difficulty to clearly & consistently define what the corporate strategy is or much of this struggle is traced to the interpretation of a word strategy itself.
Original meaning of word strategy generally derives from Geek strategia that is been used in military terms & represents an ability to employ accessible resources to win any war. The interpretation has generated a lot of problems when this concept is used among the business context as it implies existence, even necessity, of the opponents. Thus, many managers believed that the corporate strategy will imply the strong focus on the competition, as competition happens almost exclusively at offering level and most of the organisations concentrate the strategic efforts on improving their goods & services that they give. The overemphasis on temporary success, will often obscure type of thinking & emphasis that will lead to the sustained success, and even the continuous repetition of the temporary successes does not equate to the sustainable strategy. In the effort to increase value of the single offerings, organisation is distracted from the larger structure, aim and objective.
In war, the objectives often are clearly defined, and thus strategy is called as the way to the specific end. And this thing has persisted in corporate world and where the strategies are conceived as the plans for accomplishing the specific goals. Even though the corporate strategy is goal oriented, particularly in early stages of the company’s development, nature of the goals implies the temporary success. In contrast, the sustainable success isn’t, and can’t be the end unto itself and goal to attain. Thus, goal orientation gets arguably inappropriate while success needs to be sustained indefinitely. In spite of this, the overwhelming number of the top executives & researchers make the extensive use of the objectives in the quest of long lasting corporate success. Certainly, many factors contribute to that: need of the leaders with the limited tenure to achievements points, tyranny of meeting such expectations of financial markets & most management teams rely on planning and forecasting.
Still, an idea held by many managers that the strategy itself is about the goal achievement exacerbates this situation. Thus, it is very important for the strategists to keep in mind that more specific the objective, further away it might potentially lead this organisation from the optimal big picture. Thus, how strategy must be redefined? It can’t rely very strongly on the objectives nor it focus very heavily on the competition.
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