Strategic management
managing a company's responses to external issues, aiming to provide overall organizational direction and objectives, as well as policies and plans for implementation
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies, and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex organizational environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Michael Porter identifies three principles underlying strategy:
Creating a "unique and valuable [market] position".
Making trade-offs by choosing "what not to do".
Creating "fit" by aligning company activities with one another to support the chosen strategy.
Corporate strategy involves answering a key question from a portfolio perspective: "What business should we be in?" Business strategy involves answering the question: "How shall we compete in this business?" Alternatively, corporate strategy may be thought of as the strategic management of a corporation (a particular legal structure of a business), and business strategy as the strategic management of a business.
Management theory and practice often make a distinction between strategic management and operational management, where operational management is concerned primarily with improving efficiency and controlling costs within the boundaries set by the organization's strategy.
Definitions
Michael Porter defined strategy in 1980 as the "...broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry out those goals" and the "...combination of the ends (goals) for which the firm is striving and the means (policies) by which it is seeking to get there." He continued that "The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment."
However, in 1988, Henry Mintzberg described the many different definitions and perspectives on strategy reflected in both academic research and in practice.
“Strategic management” enters the record as managing a company's responses to external issues, aiming to provide overall organizational direction and objectives, as well as policies and plans for implementation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Strategic, management and managing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q376657. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Strategic management” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.