Lessons on Managing and Planning Strategically

Executive Summary -

The Article “Lessons on how to Manage and Plan Strategically” covers the process of defin-ing a strategy for an organization. It starts by explaining the differences between effective-ness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing things right) and shows why a manager should keep the differentiation in mind while developing a strategy.

Going along with the definition of strategy as “a plan of actions designed to achieve a particular goal,” the first step of defining a strategy is defining the organizations goal – the mission. This mission describes the fundamental purpose of an organization and what the organization does and gives the manager a direction where to head. The direction alone yet is not sufficient to plan the actions and to define a strategy. Every organization consists of several stakeholders and it therefore has to represent their beliefs. In order to do this the second step of planning strategically is finding out the values of the organization, which represent the stakeholders’ beliefs. The following third step of defining a strategy is analyz-ing the current position of an organization, so that together with the mission and the values of an organization a vision of where the company wants to see itself in the future can be created in the fourth step. Finally in the last step managers compare the current position of the organization with the position defined in the vision and derive actions that build the strategy of an organization and move it to the desired position. To assist this process the article introduces the several tools – the PESTLE-Analysis, Porters 5 Forces, the SWAT-Analysis and SMART-Visions.

As a final remark it is important consider the fact that the steps of deve...

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...ps define a strong vision. SMART - which means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely - describes how a perfect vi-sion should look like. If a vision satisfies these five points, chances are high that when cor-rect action is taken, this vision will become reality.

The last step in the process of strategic planning brings us back to Drucker’s quote. As a final step, the actions specified in total should be examined to determine whether they fall under the category of effective actions (in which case they bring the organization to-wards its goal) or whether they are just efficient actions (and therefore do not bring the or-ganization closer towards its goal). If the process of planning strategically has been done properly, the actions specified will be both effective and efficient, and will lead the organi-zation to its goal in a resource saving way.