Strategic Choice and Analysis Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Strategic Choice and Analysis - Assignment Example Stephen Haines' Centre for Strategic Management has built a new strategic planning system based on systems thinking and calls it the 21st Century Yearly Strategic Management System and Cycle. This system moves beyond planning into implementation. It includes a Plan-to-Plan phase and a Plan-to-Implement phase. The steps include team building and leadership skill building as part of the planning. It also includes a parallel process whereby all key stakeholders are involved based on the premise that 'People support what they help create'. This process starts with a Futuristic Environmental Scan and defines the ideal vision in terms of mission, values and end outcomes that the organization wishes to set for itself. Only after the statement of such Ideal Future a Current State assessment based on SWOT is taken up to identify the gaps and make strategies to close the gap.As a result of their clients adopting this model, it was found that clients began developing the competitive edge and th e organization was much clearer on what their competitive "positioning" in market place was and found themselves moving positively in that direction, to the delight of their customers.(Haines,2004).Thus this process leans directly into the process of competitive strategy making as it includes environmental scan both-present and future and enables movement in the desired direction. However this system's parallel process is a very critical aspect and strategic management literature has a common view that good strategies grow out of ideas that have been floating around the firm, and initiatives that have been taken by all sorts of people in the firm. This resource must be drawn upon as frequently as required even in competitive strategy making. Thus a company's competitive strategy would concern primarily with its actions and plans for competing successfully - its specific and focused efforts to please clients, its offensive and defensive maneuvers to counter similar efforts of rivals, its responses to prevailing market conditions, and its initiatives to strengthen and improve its market position. Types of Competitive Strategies The generic competitive strategies and their standard objectives have been given in numerous strategic management literatures to include the following: (a) Overall Low-Cost Leadership Strategy: Its primary object is to find a sustainable cost advantage over rivals, using lower-cost edge as a basis either to under-price rivals and reap market share gains or earn higher profit margin by selling at going price. (b) Broad Differentiation Strategy: Its primary objective is to incorporate differentiating features that cause buyers to prefer firm's product or service over rival brands. Looking on the obverse side it implies that an organization must find ways to differentiate that create value for buyers and that such ways should not be amenable to easy copying and matching by rivals. An important differentiation strategy is not to spend more than the chargeable price premium, ever to achieve differentiation. This is in fact the theoretical