Reply 2 for week 1

Running head: CREATING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES 2

Varda

Discussion 1 – Strategic Management: Creating Competitive Advantages

The chapter focuses on how challenging a business environment can be given the level of competition that exists in a firm. As described by the example of Lucent Technologies, a business should keep striving and looking for means to stay relevant. If this is not looked at carefully business can be easily lost to competitors and impact long term success for the business.

There are two types of leaders that exist i.e. romantic or external control. The idea behind it is that if we go with the romantic approach, we see that businesses have leaders who consider the success of the business to be a result directly related to their own personal efforts. Similarly, because of this anything that impacts the business in an adverse fashion if considered the soul responsibility of the leader. In contrast, external controls put less stress on efforts of the leader but focuses more towards externalities that exist and thus can prove to be either good or bad for business. The study of strategic management however does not give precedence to one over the other but stresses that both internal and external business factors are what can make or break the business and thus looking at both holistically is appropriate. This is done by allowing business to conduct a detailed assessment of the industry, business, the various players that are involved and advise strategies keeping all these factors in mind. Although strategy development is important as it shows you the path that you must pursue, one must also remember that it is equally important to implement the decisions that are made. Often businesses make the mistake of taking a long time in creating strategies but not executing them in a timely manner. This can also result in a loss of opportunity. For any business to be able to retain a sustainable competitive advantage, a business needs to identify what is unique about them and improve upon that to become more efficient and indispensable. According to Dess et al. (2004), there are four main attributes of strategic management. Firstly, the aim for goals and objectives in strategic management are set company wide instead of being observed in silos. All employees of the organization work towards the unified goal and can relate to it. Thus, the activities that they perform may differ but have some contribution to the over al impact of activities of the business. Secondly, strategic management looks at opinion of multiple stakeholders as they are recognized to bring value to the firm. Thus, their voice and concerns are important to be heard for the long-term success of the business. Thirdly, this form of management does not just focus on the short-term goals but links them to the long-term goals. This is highly necessary as if one only focuses on the short-term objectives eventually the business will lose meaning unless tied in with long-term objectives. The last is the recognition of trading of efficiency and effectiveness with business decisions.

Looking at businesses today, companies that are practicing strategic management are growing and doing more than just running businesses. These businesses have been able to create and sustain a long-term position in the world because they understand why it is important to think ahead and prepare now for the future. One such business is Coca Cola which is a household name but till this day connects its products to people in unique ways and has established an impactful goal that everyone can agree with.

References

Dess, G., McNamara, G., Eisner, A., & Lee, S. H. (2021). Strategic Management: Creating Competitive Advantages (10th edition). McGraw-Hill Higher Education