COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Competitive advantage

Strategic Management

Introduction

The basic premise of Strategic Management Development (SMD) is to ensure that, as new products/services anticipated and developed, the organization has identified and mobilized competent and knowledgeable managers to perform the various tasks necessary to implement successful the strategy in an efficient and timely manner.

When viewed as an integral element of the competitive strategy, SMD's role is cyclical in the process and function. By consistently monitoring organizational plans, SMD identifies which specialized management development activities will be needed to ensure maximum managerial performance and efficiency. For example, it may make sound business sense to have a smaller number of competent managers trained to assume a wider variety of tasks and roles which may be required by a flexible competitive strategy. In this era of downsizing, cross-functional training and developmental activities throughout various organizational units would assist in maintaining a combative posture, even with limited resources. Individuals responsible for SMD would need to monitor close the competitive strategy to ensure that the skills needed to implement it successfully will be available (or can be readily acquired) on a short-term basis. This requires that all management development efforts be flexibly in-concert with the competitive strategy in anticipation that specific requirements will arise. This mirroring, as it were, will require constant feedback and support between those individuals in the various managerial functions and those responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing the SMD process.

Many larger, multinational organizations have already established, to one degree or another, a type of competitive SMD strategy. Coca-Cola, GE, Xerox, IBM, and Northern Telecom, for example, have instituted long-term management development strategies to enhance their competitive advantage as part of their efforts to maintain, as well as advance, their positions in the their respective marketplaces. Additionally, McCall observed that, in many organizations, the importance of having a large and agreeable base of managerial talent is not apparent until a shortage of it produces crises situations.

Strategy as a natural and physical activity

Strategies in natural systems seem to emerge spontaneously from the interaction between environment and organisms over time. Whether and individual or a population will be more or less successful to cope with environmental changes determined by the capability to respond to such changes, or in other words, by their capability of adaptation. Therefore, there is an implicit link between strategy and the need to adapt successfully to new conditions in the surrounding environment (Parasuraman, 1991, 48). Here, however, strategy seems a little closer to instinct than to deliberation. Strategy in Organizations. Over time, the influence of organizations over life has increased continuously, particularly in most developed economies. They have become the building blocks of societies.

Today, individuals and groups, derive their identities from organizations. They influence the present and shape the future. Organizations share more power than individuals do. People increasingly delegates roles and tasks to organizations. We trust them with the production and control of resources and infrastructure. We are gradually becoming dependant on the functioning of ...