BCG Article: Business Strategies in an Unregulated Environment ...

Business strategy includes the areas of corporate strategy, marketing and brand strategy, sales strategy, as well other areas of strategic thinking. When we speak about growth strategy, we include both normal business growth and inorganic growth, namely mergers and acquisitions. Marketing strategy includes branding strategy, product launch strategy, and Internet strategy. Marketing strategy and sales strategy are usually discussed in unity, but are distinct in actuality. Sales strategy includes distribution strategy, distribution strategy, and business development. Business strategies are often done within an annual strategic planning session or workshop, usually held in a 2 day off site location with management and key stakeholders, both inside and external to the business.

Business strategy development has evolved through 5 key phases since the early 1900s. Business strategy development started with a focus on financial planning in the 1950s, moving to long-term planning in the 1960s, to strategic planning in the 1970s and ultimately to a focus on strategic management in the present day. Shifts in strategic mindset represent an ever evolving, emerging business leaders, and emergence of disruptive technologies and trends. A lot of competitive strategy is also hinged on ideas in the 1970s, where the core theme was around thinking strategically to beat competition and the business frameworks of alternative strategies, portfolio analysis, and the BCG Growth Share Matrix were developed. In the current day, the strategic development theme is on integrating strategic planning and implementation with a stress on the primary notions of core competencies, strategy planning and execution, and balance scorecard analysis.

Structured business communication is oftentimes framed under a business framework. Crawl Walk Run is a popular framework for representing the progression of organizational change, from an initial crawl stage eventually to walk-type activities and ultimately to the run phase of technology-enabled processes. Well known ones include Pintos Pyramid Principle, which is widely practiced by management consultants and management executives in structuring PowerPoint presentations. The Pyramid Principle is embedded into the presentation storyboarding process.

The way business leaders evaluate and analyze strategy within that of modern business organizations has been built upon a platform of military strategists since the beginning of organized warfare. Sun Tzu spoke about indirect corporate strategies when he said winning without fighting is the highest of skill on the battlefield. Sun Tzus thoughts about the factor of terrain, if we were to take that into the context of companies competing today, translates to markets, industry structures, market positions, and Porters Five Forces. Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War, which has been adopted into a business strategy book. In Sun Tzus Art of War, he spoke about five fundamental factors in military strategy and each of these factors relates to a popular concept of business strategy.

To create a robust corporate strategy, businesses all must conduct strategy development that starts with a clear set of beliefs around its current situation and identified strategic barriers to growth. In order to understand your strategic challenges, you must begin with a complete, end-to-end understanding of your situation. The next steps include defining what the desired vision of the organization is and then going into the details of strategically planning how to get to that state. It is also important to realize that there is more to strategy than just winning. Strategy is about value creation, strategy is about focus, and strategy is about business mobility.

Today, there are Mintzberg and Bower present contrasting and complementary ideas around strategic management. Mintzberg proposes for an organization, bottom-ups strategy to drive the strategy development process that adheres to organizational configuration. In organizational configuration, the organization engages in behaviors based on adaptation to contexts. Mintzberg also advocates a transformation of business processes, where management recognizes the need and has the ability to manage organizational business transformation.

Different size organizations almost always experience different challenges and thus, undertake different approaches to managing their business strategy. Some companies may be in the nascent growth stages, whereas more established Fortune 500 companies are in the sustain phase. A SME may be more entrepreneurial in its approach to business growth and its operations are often much more lean and agile. A global company may employ a more structured tactically sound management model, due to its greater size and scope of both operations.
Business Strategy

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