The Evergreen Project
Can an organization survive without a strategy? Why? Provide evidence to support your claim.
To best address the above question, an understanding of strategy and strategic management must first be established. The MGT330 lecture 1 slides provide a concise definition of both. Within the context of business, strategy refers to the plans and actions a company selects to achieve its targets. By extension, strategic management is the process of setting goals for an organization, planning and implementing any necessary changes, and measuring the outcomes .
Historically, there was a time when strategic management was only conducted by large corporate conglomerates. Prior to the explosive growth of technology and the Internet in the 1990’s, …show more content…
There have been many recent studies that compare financially successful companies with less successful counterparts. In ‘The Evergreen Project’, the companies that demonstrated a clearly defined and well articulated strategy outperformed the losing companies by a startling 945% to 62% margin in total return to shareholders, and a 415% to 83% advantage in sales .
Other studies showed similar results. The R2i study compared the 35% of companies that reported increased profit or revenue using social media with the companies that did not. It found the companies with increased revenue were about twice as likely to have formed a formal strategy and about twice as likely to have created a system to measure their outcomes .
It comes then as little surprise that an extensive search online for scholarly evidence of companies that have achieved success WITHOUT some sort of strategy did not yield any …show more content…
On the surface, it may look like multinational corporation Google has no business strategy. Renown for its informal corporate culture, the company has famously adopted a ‘20% time’ policy, whereby any engineer (and some other employees) is allowed to spend one fifth of his or her time on the clock working on their own project. Vice president of Google, Marissa Mayer, acknowledges that over 80% of these projects will fail . While encouraging projects that are more likely than not to fail may seem to be an unjustifiable business decision, Google does in fact consider this tact to be PART of its strategic management plan, and have adopted an accordingly inspirational business strategy philosophy - ‘Work on global, cross functional projects is at the heart of what we do’.
In conclusion, long term survival in today’s fast paced business environment is not possible without the use of strategy. The adoption of strategic management practices allows a company to make better decisions, provide better solutions, improve customer satisfaction and exhibit a competitive advantage against it’s non strategic rivals.
JK
To best address the above question, an understanding of strategy and strategic management must first be established. The MGT330 lecture 1 slides provide a concise definition of both. Within the context of business, strategy refers to the plans and actions a company selects to achieve its targets. By extension, strategic management is the process of setting goals for an organization, planning and implementing any necessary changes, and measuring the outcomes .
Historically, there was a time when strategic management was only conducted by large corporate conglomerates. Prior to the explosive growth of technology and the Internet in the 1990’s, …show more content…
There have been many recent studies that compare financially successful companies with less successful counterparts. In ‘The Evergreen Project’, the companies that demonstrated a clearly defined and well articulated strategy outperformed the losing companies by a startling 945% to 62% margin in total return to shareholders, and a 415% to 83% advantage in sales .
Other studies showed similar results. The R2i study compared the 35% of companies that reported increased profit or revenue using social media with the companies that did not. It found the companies with increased revenue were about twice as likely to have formed a formal strategy and about twice as likely to have created a system to measure their outcomes .
It comes then as little surprise that an extensive search online for scholarly evidence of companies that have achieved success WITHOUT some sort of strategy did not yield any …show more content…
On the surface, it may look like multinational corporation Google has no business strategy. Renown for its informal corporate culture, the company has famously adopted a ‘20% time’ policy, whereby any engineer (and some other employees) is allowed to spend one fifth of his or her time on the clock working on their own project. Vice president of Google, Marissa Mayer, acknowledges that over 80% of these projects will fail . While encouraging projects that are more likely than not to fail may seem to be an unjustifiable business decision, Google does in fact consider this tact to be PART of its strategic management plan, and have adopted an accordingly inspirational business strategy philosophy - ‘Work on global, cross functional projects is at the heart of what we do’.
In conclusion, long term survival in today’s fast paced business environment is not possible without the use of strategy. The adoption of strategic management practices allows a company to make better decisions, provide better solutions, improve customer satisfaction and exhibit a competitive advantage against it’s non strategic rivals.
JK