Add insight and question to Classmate response below:

1) State and describe three benefits of strategic management.

Strategic management is a set of managerial decisions and actions that help determine the long-term performance of an organization. It includes environmental scanning (both external and internal), strategy formulation (strategic or long-range planning), strategy implementation, and evaluation and control.

Page 5

3 Benefits of strategic management agreed upon by various companies in various industries are:

• A clearer sense of strategic vision for the firm.
• A sharper focus on what is strategically important.
• An improved understanding of a rapidly changing environment.

Page 7

2) What concept describes an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights is a(n).

The concept that describes the type of organization listed above is called a learning organization. Organizational learning is a critical component of competitiveness inadynamic environment. It is particularly important to innovation and new product development.

Learning organizations are skilled at four main activities:

• Solving problems systematically
• Experimenting with new approaches
• Learning from their own experiences and past history as well as from the experiences of others
• Transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization

Strategic management is essential for learning organizations to avoid stagnation through continuous self-examination and experimentation.

Page 13

3) What characterizes the planning mode (or process) of strategy formulation?

Strategy formulation is the process of investigation, analysis, and decision making that provides the company with the criteria for attaining a competitive advantage. It includes defining the competitive advantages of the business, identifying weaknesses that are impacting the company's ability to grow, crafting the corporate mission, specifying achievable objectives, and setting policy guidelines.

Page 16

Henry Mintzberg concluded that strategy formulation is not a regular, continuous process: "It is most often an irregular, discontinuous process, proceeding in fits and starts. There are periods of stability in strategy development, but also there are periods of flux, of groping, of piecemeal change, and of global change."

Page 23