Strategic management - C4 - Essay Example

functional disciplines (manufacturing, finance, marketing, human resources, R&D, etc) near the end of their academic program, but hardly thought of strategic management as a separate discipline or as a branch of business policy. With the publication of some books on corporate strategy, particularly that of Prof. Igor Ansoff, better awareness of the corporate environment developed as having sometimes critical impact on the organization and the results that it sought to achieve in a sometimes chaotic and turbulent environment.

That the firm had to look towards expansion and diversification and that it could achieve synergy (“the whole is more than the sum of the the parts”) in some strategic decisions became quite obtrusive in the consciousness of many executives, particularly members of top management and corporate boards. Academicians and business writers began to talk about the environment and its impact on businesses in search of growth and expansion: the societal environment, the task environment, and the internal environment.

(Buchholz, 1992). The societal environment consisted of the economic forces, the socio-cultural forces, the legal/political forces, and the technological forces, and some writers added the demographic forces and global forces. In addition, closer to the organization, there was the task environment, which comprised: the stockholders, customers, suppliers, workers/labor unions, governments and government regulatory agencies, creditors, competitors, trade associations, and the communities in which they operate.

The balancing of the interests of the various stakeholders was important for the success of the organization. Finally, the internal environment, the organization itself with its structure, values, culture and resources, and the need to assess the organizational strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis the challenges posed by the broad societal environment. An organization in search of opportunities needed to perform environmental