Topic 1 & Topic 2

17/09/2013 (Tuesday)

-Week 2 –

Today I learned 2 chapters which is Nature of Strategic Management and The Business Vision & Mission.  For the first hour lecture, I taught about nature of strategic management.  Firstly, strategic management can be defined as formatting, implementing, evaluating cross-functional decision to achieve the company goals.  Strategic management is a business term and strategic planning is an academic term.  There are three stages in strategic management which is strategy formulation, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation.  Strategy formulation more based on how to make vision and mission, and how to determine SWOT analysis.  Strength and weaknesses are for internal environment.  Opportunity and threat are for external environment.  It is also about how to develop the revenue and how to decrease the expenses for company.  Then, strategy implementation is discussed about how to establish the objectives and how to motivate the employees.  It is called action stages.  Strategy evaluation is more about measuring performance and taking corrective actions.  From the three stages, I think every company should take care all the stages for achieve the main objectives.

          Next chapter, I learned about The Business Vision and Mission.  From this part, I knew how to differentiate between vision and mission.  Vision statement is about “what do we want to become?”  Vision statement should be short and should have input to develop the statement.  Mission statement is reason for being or “how to achieve the vision statement”.  Vision and mission is so important for the company because to ensure unanimity of purpose within the organization, to provide a basis for allocating organizational resources and to establish organizational climate.  The company without vision and mission, they cannot run the business smoothly.  There are nine components of mission statement which is customers, products or services, markets, technology, concern for survival, philosophy, self-concept, concern for public image and concern for employees.  All these components should been cares in mission statement to make sure the vision of company can be achieve.