Concepts in Strategic Management and Business Policy - Essay Example

The field of strategic management is broad and ideally deals with a number of emergent and intended initiatives that a general manager seeks to undertake on behalf of the organization’s owner. It incorporates resource utilization with the aim of enhancing the organization or firm’s performance with regard to its external environs. This means that strategic management brings together the mission, objectives, and vision of a firm and develops policies and plans then allocates resolves to allocate resources to the set plans and policies in order to ensure their implementation (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011).

Strategic management comes along with many benefits to a business. Thomas and David Hunger maintain that firms that incorporate strategic management into their daily activities always “outperform” those firms that do not. When a firm enlarges, it becomes hard for it to afford to follow intuitive strategies. This is because, upon enlargement, a firm’s environment or its layers of management changes substantially (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011). However, as the working environment continues to be more complex due to ever-changing systems of management in the world, today, firms are applying strategic management as a form of cooperating and making the environment more manageable. Strategic management is beneficial to a firm mainly because it facilitates the collection of information and formulation of policies. The laundry firm can use strategic management policies to gather information from the external and internal environment which in turn corporate formulation of variables in the firm.

With globalization comes a broad market. In this case, globalization enables a firm to identify general forces that include societal and natural environments that make it easier to identify different clusters of competitors and customers making it easier to combine a sustainable environment. It is necessary for a firm to have suitable information in order to find ways in which it can fulfill its goals via its corporate mission (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011). Globalization makes it possible for a firm to have structural, resourceful, and cultural information, which is important for a firm to enhance its corporate strategy. In addition, strategic management enables a firm to implement the set policies and formulate the gathered information, which facilitates the assessment of its capabilities. This in turn draws measures that enable the firm to satisfy its clientele by improving its distribution of products and services via an organized system.

The impacts of environmental sustainability on a business are many. For the laundry firm to achieve the best in its line of business, it must set in place models that play an important role in creating a sustainable environment. This shows that businesses should have models that contribute to a healthy and safe environment. According to environmental experts, a safe environment provides a platform for economic growth and business sustainable development. In order to get benefits that come along with a sustained environment, a firm must address environmental issues such as pollution. As such, this laundry firm should seek to address environmental problems in order to enjoy innovative solutions brought by new market opportunities (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011).

In addressing components involved in the environmental scanning and industry analysis process, analysts revolve around environmental assessment, forecasting, and monitoring. In this case, environmental scanning deals with the macro-environment, which consists of competitors, industries, clients, markets, and companies. Environmental scanning thus interprets technological and economic events as well as political trends that are influential to a business or an industry (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011). Furthermore, environmental scanning opines that factors or elements that need consideration in a business comprise events, expectations, and trends as well as issues set forth by different interested groups. In most cases, issues are just forerunners brought about by trend breaks. On the other end, trend breaks ascertain to things like a technological innovation that could be just a paradigm change or permanent or a shift in value within society. In some instances, issues can be a short-term paradigm with a temporary impact. Hence, environmental scanning is a phenomenon that adopts a structural character.

In conclusion, for a firm to succeed, it must analyze the key factors of success in order to obtain the importance of organizational analysis. For the technician and the administrator to reap maximum benefits out their laundry firm, they must realize the importance of organizational analysis and consider critical factors of success. Critical success factors are important in a business because they aid in achieving the businesses’ set goals and mission stated. Critical success factors comprise of elements or areas that which when businessperson results to implement must act on them essentially and well if he were to achieve the set objectives of the business. When a firm creates and identifies its critical success factors, it forms a common point of reference that helps in directing and measuring the success of the business (Wheelen & Hunger, 2011).