Penang - Strategic Management

Back to Penang for the second time. Today we have studied Module Strategic Management and we were involved in group discussion. From my POV, it seemed that everybody was confusing Strategic Mgt with Project Mgt. To my simple understanding, strategic mgt is something like project mgt, but not project mgt. What is strategy? It's a long-term target that the business owner wants to achieve. When we talk about strategic mgt, we first define what strategy is and what are related to strategic mgt. Strategic mgt is a process where sr mgrs have to set out vision and mission. What is vision? Vision is what you want to have and where you want to head. Mission is something like your commitment to your business, your customers, your society and your environment. You have to translate your vision and mission into actions, and these action can be called strategies. In Strategic Mgt, we talk about 5 tasks:
1- First you have to develop your strategic Vision & Mission
2- Second you should set your objectives
3- Third you craft a strategy to achieve your set objectives
4- Then you, as understood as fourth, must implement and execute your strategy, otherwise nothing happens.
5- Lastly it's time to evaluate & correct your action plans.

To me, last step seems very important as we would know whether we are in the right track and what we need to adjust to make sure our objectives are being achieved in the right way. We might revise or adjust our action plans or even our strategy but we rarely change our objectives. Once we set an objective, we have reasons to do that and if we quit, that means we leave our target, we compromise.

In strategic mgt, large business and small business build their strategy a little bit differently. With large business, they should have bigger view of business and future development. Therefore their vision is of long-term and mission is of larger scope. Large businesses aim to bigger market with various targets in a global environment. Objectives are also more "macro" and ambitous. They pay more attention to their strategic objectives while small business sometimes put their strategy aside and focus more on sales operations. When we talk about objectives in strategic mgt, we understand that there are two objectives: financial & strategic. Small business usually set financial objectives rather than strategic objectives while larger business set priority for strategic objectives. Financial objectives are also important but they would rather invest more resources to achieve their strategic objectives. Once you achieve your strategic objectives, you can hit your financial target easily... (con't)