Strategy Concept
The term strategy has its etymological origin in the Greek word “strategos”, which drifts from stratus (army) + agos (command). So, strategy meant, the art of the general commanding his troops.
In the management of organizations context, and in its most wider sense, the term strategy designates the organizations’ intention or, by other words, represents the group of decisions and actions to adopt by the organization that seek to provide the client more value than the one offered by the competitors as a way to achieve certain results. Thereby, we can consider that a manager is a good strategist whenever he has a high capacity to get ahead the competitors in the discovery of high generative value opportunities understood by the client.
Being the definition of a purpose, the strategy necessarily involves the long term decision making, including the definition of the products and services, the markets choice, the kind of positioning to adopt, the development goals, etc. Bearing in mind the time limits and to the fact of involving the organization as a whole, to this kind of decisions is generally given the designation of strategic decisions, whose, afterwards precede and constrain all of the operational decisions.
The organizational strategy process formulation generally involves several phases, which can be resumed in the following:
- External Diagnosis: previous phase destined to identify the threats and opportunities that the surroundings can bring to the organization, either in the present or in the future.
- Internal Diagnosis: phase in which is made the identification of strong and weak points that the company presents when compared with its direct competitors;
- Strategic Guidelines: from the conclusions taken from the external and internal diagnosis is therefore possible to define a set of strategic guidelines, which include the markets, products and services choice, the definition of the positioning to adopt, the definition of the goals to achieve, this is the definition of the strategy itself.
For a bigger strategy organization and systematizing, is generally built a plan where are detailed the conclusions of each phase of the process. To this plan is given the designation of Strategic Plan, and to its construction process the designation of strategic planning.
