Preconditions for the emergence of strategic management. Strategic management concepts Reasons for the emergence of strategic management

Management

The emergence of strategic management is caused by objective reasons arising from changes in the nature of the environment of enterprises. Consider the main groups of factors that have changed this environment.

The first group of factors is due to global trends in the development of the market economy. These include: internationalization and globalization of business; new unexpected business opportunities created by advances in science and technology; the development of information networks makes it possible to disseminate and receive information at lightning speed; wide availability of modern technologies; changing the role of human resources; increased competition; sa resources; acceleration of changes in the environment.

The second group of factors is a consequence of those transformations in the management system of the Russian economy that occurred during the transition to a market model of management, mass privatization of enterprises in almost all industries. As a result, the upper layer of management structures, which was busy collecting information, developing a long-term strategy and determining the directions of development of individual industries and industries, was eliminated. One can treat in different ways the already defunct sectoral ministries and planning bodies, but 1 it cannot be denied that the latter, having a powerful network of sectoral and departmental institutions, carried out practically the entire volume of work to develop promising directions for the development of enterprises, transforming them into long-term current plans. which were communicated from above to the performers. The task of the management of the enterprises was to carry out operational functions to organize the fulfillment of these tasks.

As a result of the rapid elimination of this upper layer of management, combined with privatization, when the state abandoned the management of the overwhelming majority of enterprises, the management of associations and firms was automatically transferred all functions that were previously performed by higher bodies. Naturally, the mentality of managers, the entire internal organization of enterprises turned out to be, in most cases, unprepared for this type of activity.

The third group of factors that change the environment of enterprise activity is associated with the emergence of a huge number of economic entities of various forms of ownership. A large number of workers who were unprepared for professional management activities came into the field of entrepreneurship. This necessitated their accelerated assimilation of the theory and practice of strategic management.

The fourth group of factors, which is also of a purely Russian character, is due to the general socio-economic situation of the period of transition from a planned economy to a market economy. A landslide decline in production, a radical restructuring of the economy, massive non-payments, inflation, growing unemployment and other negative factors - all this extremely complicates the activities of economic organizations, regardless of the form of ownership, accompanied by a growing wave of bankruptcies and other negative phenomena.

From all this it follows that increased attention to the problems of strategic management can and should ensure the functioning of enterprises in extreme conditions. It is no coincidence that some experts put forward the thesis that in such a situation one should speak first of all about the strategy of survival, and only then about the strategy.

That is why the question is important: when exactly does recourse to strategy become vital? One of these conditions is the occurrence of sudden changes in the external environment of the firm. They can be caused by: saturation of demand, major changes in technology inside or outside the company, the unexpected appearance of numerous new competitors, etc.

In such situations, traditional organizational principles and experience fail to address the challenges of exploiting new opportunities and fail to prevent hazards. If the organization does not have a single strategy, then it is possible that different departments will develop heterogeneous, conflicting and ineffective solutions. The sales service will fight to revive the previous demand for the company's products, the production units will make capital investments in the automation of aging production, and the R&D service will develop new products based on the old technology. This will lead to conflicts, delay the reorientation of the firm, and render it erratic and ineffective. It may be that the reorientation has begun too late to guarantee the survival of the enterprise.

In such a situation, the firm must solve two extremely difficult problems:

Choose the desired growth planning from several options;

To direct the efforts of the team in the right direction.

Along with clear advantages, strategic management has a number of disadvantages and limitations on its use. Thus, this type of control, like all others, does not have universality for use in all situations when solving any problems.

Strategic management, by its very nature, does not give, and cannot give an accurate and detailed picture. The picture of the future desired state of the organization formed in strategic management is not a detailed description of its internal and external position, but rather a qualitative wish for anyone, what the organization should become after a while, what position to occupy in the market and in business, what kind of organizational culture it should have. what business groups should be included in, etc. Together, this should determine whether or not the organization will survive in the future in the competitive struggle.

This kind of management cannot be reduced to a set of routine procedures and schemes. He does not have a descriptive theory that prescribes what and how to do in solving certain problems or in specific situations.

Strategic management- it is, rather, a certain, philosophy or business ideology and management. And each individual manager understands and implements it in his own way. Of course, there are a number of guidelines, rules and logical frameworks for analyzing problems and choosing a strategy, as well as for the implementation of strategic planning and practical implementation of the strategy. However, in general, strategic management is a symbiosis of intuition and art, with which leadership must lead the organization towards strategic goals; it is a high professionalism and creativity of employees, ensuring the connection of the organization with the environment, the renewal of the organization and its products, the implementation of current plans and, finally, the active involvement of all employees in the process of finding the best ways to achieve the goals of the organization or firm.

It takes a tremendous amount of effort, time and resources to establish strategic management in an organization. To do this, first of all, it is necessary to organize strategic planning, which in itself is fundamentally different from the development of long-term plans that are binding in any conditions. The strategic plan must be flexible, it must respond to changes inside and outside the organization, and this requires a great deal of effort and high costs. It is also necessary to create services that keep track of the environment and the inclusion of the organization in the environment. Marketing, public relations, etc. acquire exceptional value and require significant additional costs.

The negative consequences of mistakes in strategic foresight are sharply increasing. In an environment where completely new products are created in a short time, when new business opportunities suddenly appear and opportunities that have existed for many years disappear before our eyes, the very existence of an organization often becomes the price for misprediction and, accordingly, mistakes in strategic choice. Particularly tragic are the consequences of an incorrect forecast for organizations that pursue an uncontested path of development or implement a strategy that cannot be fundamentally corrected.

In the implementation of strategic management, the focus is often on strategic planning. In fact, the most important component of strategic management is the implementation of the strategic plan. Here, it is especially important to create an organizational culture that allows for implementation! strategy, build a system of motivation and work organization, I a certain flexibility in the organization, etc. In this case, under strategic management, the execution process has an active opposite effect on planning, which only enhances the significance of the execution phase. Therefore, an organization that possesses let! even a very good strategic planning subsystem, but not having the prerequisites or opportunities for creating a strategic execution subsystem, in principle, will not be able to switch to strategic management.

The evolution of internal management systems makes it possible to understand that successive systems correspond (to the sweeping level of instability (uncertainty) of the external environment. Since the beginning of the century, two types of enterprise management systems have been developed: management based on control over execution (post factum) and management based on extrapolation of the past.

By now, two types of control systems have developed.

The first type is based on position determination. Management based on anticipation of changes, when unexpected phenomena began to arise and the pace of change accelerated, but not so much that it was impossible to determine the reaction to them in time. This type includes long-term and strategic planning, management through the selection of strategic positions.

The second type is associated with a timely response, giving a response to rapid and unexpected changes in the environment, management based on flexible emergency solutions. This type includes management based on the ranking of strategic objectives, management of strong and weak signals, management in the face of strategic surprises.

The choice of a combination of different systems for a particular enterprise depends on the conditions of the environment in which it operates. The choice of the positioning system is due to the novelty and complexity of the tasks. The choice of a timely response system depends on the pace of change and the predictability of the tasks. The synthesis of these control systems makes it possible to form a strategic management method that most fully meets the conditions of flexibility and uncertainty of the external environment.

Control questions

1. What are the main reasons and factors that led to the growing role of strategic management.

2. Formulate the basic definitions of the concepts of "strategy" and "strategic management".

3. What are the differences between operational and strategic management?

4. What are the main difficulties in implementing strategic management?

5. What are the main levels of strategic management.

6. Give a general description of the strategy.

7. What are the characteristics of the strategy of individual business units?

8. What are the main types of functional strategies.

The emergence of strategic management is caused by objective reasons associated with an increase in the share of uncertainty and unpredictability of business conditions and the complexity of the external environment. The need for the survival and development of an organization in a rapidly changing socio-cultural and economic environment required the improvement and modification of systems and management methods.

After analyzing the modification of management systems depending on the conditions of entrepreneurial activity in countries with a market economy, the largest specialist in the field of strategic management I. Ansoff identified three main characteristics of environmental instability that affect these changes: the degree of familiarity of events, the rate of change and predictability of the future. Each level of instability in the external environment corresponds to its own stage in the development of organization management systems. Table 1 shows the main stages of development of systems and methods of organization management.

Table 1

Stages of development of systems and management methods

1. Control based on control (budgeting). A feature of budgetary and financial methods is their short-term nature and internal orientation. With this approach, the organization is considered as a closed system, and its goals and objectives are considered given and remain, like other conditions of activity, sufficiently stable over a long period of time. The considered management system is based on performance control, which includes: labor management (norms and work process standards), financial control, current budgeting, profit planning, goal management, project planning. Since norms and standards are based on past experience, control actions are associated with the past rather than with the future of the company.

The first stage in the development of management systems is associated with the preparation of financial plans ("development of budgets" - budgeting), which were limited only to annual financial estimates by items of expenditure for various purposes and the current planning of production and economic activities. The budgets were drawn up:

1) for each of the major production and economic functions (R&D, marketing, production, capital construction, etc.);

2) for individual structural units within the corporation (departments, factories, etc.).

Their main task was to manage costs. Similar plans and their modifications still serve as the main tool for the allocation of resources, as well as internal control over the current financial and production and economic activities.

2. Extrapolation-based management (long-term planning) can be seen as the response of firms to the accelerating pace of environmental change, when the forecast for the firm's sales can be predicted by analogy with the prevailing trends in the past.

The main mechanism for the implementation of this management system is long-term planning. , which assumes that the future can be predicted by extrapolating historical development trends. Based on the sales target figures, functional plans for production, marketing, and supply were determined. Then all plans were aggregated into a single financial plan of the corporation.

In our country, this approach was known as the "planning from achieved" method, when production volumes were set from above, rather than sales volumes. As in a market economy.

3. Management based on anticipation of changes (strategic planning). A. Fayol, a classic of management science, noted: “to manage is to foresee, and to foresee is almost to act”. As the crisis intensified and international competition intensified, forecasts based on extrapolation began to diverge more and more from real figures. In conditions of a high level of instability of the external environment and fierce competition, the only way to formally forecast future problems and opportunities is strategic planning, the fundamental principle of which is to ensure the organization's adaptability to environmental changes.

The main difference between long-term and strategic planning is the interpretation of the future. In strategic planning, there is no assumption that the future must necessarily be a repetition of the past. The initial principle of planning is changing - to go from the future to the present, and not from the past to the future.

In the system of strategic planning, extrapolation is replaced by a detailed strategic analysis, which connects the development prospects and the goals of the organization with each other to develop a strategy. In strategic analysis, special attention is paid to the factors of macroeconomic development, socio-demographic factors, the latest technological developments.

This approach implies the integration of financial and long-term plans into the strategic planning system, which sets two groups of tasks. First, short-term, calculated for the current implementation of programs, budgets, orienting the operational divisions of the organization in their daily work. Another group of tasks is strategic, which lay the foundations for future profitability. Such tasks do not fit well into the system of current operations and require a separate execution system based on project management. The strategic execution system also requires a separate, distinct control system.

4. Management based on flexible emergency decisions (strategic management). According to the president IVM F. Carey, this is a system "oriented to the market of tomorrow."

Management systems based on long-term and strategic planning have proven unsuitable for responding to events that are partially predictable, but develop too quickly to prepare in advance and make the necessary strategic decisions in time. In situations of instability, "anything can happen, at any time."

To cope with rapidly changing tasks, it is necessary to use a control system related not so much to the determination of the position. (long-term and strategic planning), how much with timely response in real time to rapid and unexpected changes in the environment of the organization. In fact, we are talking about strategic management as the most advanced stage of strategic planning, which, in turn, constitutes its essential basis. “Strategic planning is management by plans, and strategic management is management by results” (I. Ansoff).

Strategic management Is a complex of strategic management decisions that determine the long-term development of the organization, and specific actions that ensure a quick response of the organization to changes in external factors, which may entail the need to revise the goals and adjust the general direction of development.

Thus, strategic management is characterized by the following factors:

a quick dual response to changes in the external environment - long-term and operational at the same time (long-term is laid down in strategic plans, operational is implemented outside the planned cycle in real time);

in strategic management, not only ways of adapting to the external environment are considered, but also ways of changing it (the management process must be proactive);

strategic management includes elements of all previous management systems.

It is believed that three stages can be distinguished in the development of management.

End of the 19th century - 1920s. During this period, market demand for most types of products was stable and predictable. This ensured the stability of the production of a constant range of products. The control model of management reigned undividedly, requiring strict adherence to standards and rules, emphasizing the current control of technological processes of sales, supplies, and prevention of failures.

1920 - 1970 Instability began to grow in the economy, but the future was still predictable based on extrapolation methods, statistical and mathematical models. A planned management model has been formed, aimed at the implementation of long-term and current plans and allowing their correction, taking into account the changing situation.

Since the 1970s, there has been a period of instability in the market environment due to the unpredictability of economic life. The response to this situation was the emergence of strategic management (this term was introduced at the turn of the 1960s and 70s to denote the difference between management at the enterprise level, carried out in the old ways, and management at the firm level).

The emergence of strategic management in Russia is caused by objective reasons arising from changes in the nature of the environment of enterprises. This is due to a number of factors.

First group such factors are due to global trends in the development of a market economy. wide availability of modern technologies; changing the role of human resources; increasing competition for resources; acceleration of changes in the environment.

Second group factors stems from those transformations in the system of economic management in Russia, which occurred during the transition to a market model of management, mass privatization of enterprises in almost all industries.

Third group factors associated with the emergence of a huge number of economic structures of various forms of ownership, when a lot of unprepared for professional managerial activity came into the field of entrepreneurship, which predetermined the need for the latter to accelerate the assimilation of the theory and practice of strategic management.

Fourth group factors, which is also of a purely Russian character, is due to the general socio-economic situation that has developed during the transition period from a planned to a market economy. This situation is characterized by a decline in production, painful restructuring of the economy, massive non-payments, inflation, growing unemployment and other negative phenomena. All this extremely complicates the activities of economic organizations, is accompanied by a growing wave of bankruptcies, etc. Naturally, what is happening in the country's economy predetermines the need for increased attention to the problems of strategic management, which in turn should ensure the survival of enterprises in extreme conditions.

2. Stages of development of strategic management: budgeting and short-term planning, long-term planning, strategic planning, strategic management.

The emergence of strategic management techniques and their implementation in the practice of firms is easiest to understand in a historical context. Business historians usually identify four stages in the development of corporate planning: budgeting, long-term planning, strategic planning, and, finally, strategic management.

1. Budgeting. In the era of the formation of giant corporations before the second world war special planning services, especially long-term planning, were not created in the companies. The top executives of corporations regularly discussed and outlined plans for the development of their business, however, formal planning related to the calculation of relevant indicators, maintaining financial reporting forms, etc., was limited only to drawing up annual financial estimates - budgets by item of expenditure for various purposes.

Budgets were drawn up, firstly, for each of the major production and economic functions (R&D, marketing, capital construction, production). Secondly, by individual structural units within the corporation: branches, factories, etc. Similar budgets in the modern economy serve as the main tool for the allocation of intracorporate resources and control over current activities. A feature of budgetary and financial methods is their short-term nature and internal orientation, i.e. the organization in this case is considered as a closed system. When using only fiscal methods, the main concern of managers is operating profit and cost structure. The choice of such priorities naturally poses a threat to the long-term development of the organization.

2.Long-term planning usually covers three or five year periods. Rather, it is descriptive and determines the overall strategy of the company, since it is difficult to predict all possible calculations for such a long period. The long-term plan is developed by the management of the organization and contains the main strategic goals of the enterprise for the future.
Main areas of long-term planning:
-organizational structure;
-production capacity;
-capital investments;
- the need for funds;
-Research and development;
- market share and so on.
3. Short-term planning can be calculated for a year, half a year, a month, and so on. The short-term plan for the year includes production volume, profit planning and more. Short-term planning closely links the plans of various partners and suppliers, and therefore these plans can either be aligned, or certain points of the plan are common to the manufacturer and its partners.
A short-term financial plan is of particular importance for the company. It allows you to analyze and control liquidity, taking into account all other plans, and the reserves included in it provide information about the necessary liquidity.
4 strategic management - this is activity, aimed at achieving the main goals and objectives of the organization, determined on the basis of anticipating possible changes in the environment and organizational potential, through the coordination and allocation of resources.

Strategic management can be attributed to the philosophy or ideology of business and management, where a significant place is given to the creativity of the top management and personnel of the organization.

5.Strategic planning is a set of actions, decisions taken by management, which lead to the development of specific strategies designed to achieve goals.

Strategic planning can be presented as a set of management functions, namely:

§ * resource allocation (in the form of company reorganization);

§ * adaptation to the external environment (for example, Ford Motors);

§ * internal coordination;

§ * awareness of organizational strategy (for example, management needs to constantly learn from past experiences and predict the future).

Strategy is a comprehensive, integrated plan designed to ensure that the organization's mission and objectives are achieved.

4. Strategic management. TO 1990-m Over the years, most corporations around the world have begun the transition from strategic planning to strategic management. Strategic management is defined as a set of not only strategic management decisions that determine the long-term development of the organization, but also specific actions that ensure a quick response of the enterprise to changes in the external environment, which may entail the need for strategic maneuver, revision of goals and adjustment of the general direction of development.

5. Types of strategic management: strategic management by choosing strategic positions, management by ranking strategic objectives, management by weak signals, management in the face of strategic surprises.

Management based on the solution of strategic tasks. Management by ranking strategic objectives focuses on tactical survival, which is based on maintaining the position of the enterprise in the basic areas of activity.

No single perfect strategy can take into account all situations that arise as a result of changes in the external environment, as well as the development of the organization itself. In response to their appearance, the enterprise forms and solves strategic tasks, with the help of which the necessary adjustments to its activities (current policy, plans) are carried out. An example of such tasks is achieving high growth rates, improving the internal climate in the team; attracting new partners and clients, etc.

Management based on strategic objectives is used when the events that may occur are fully or partially predictable, but in order to react to them, it is impossible or impractical to change the general line of behavior of the enterprise. By solving strategic tasks, the organization has the ability to timely prevent the occurrence of an unfavorable situation, to a large extent to mitigate its negative consequences, or to use the opening opportunities with maximum benefit for itself.

The management process by solving newly emerging strategic tasks provides for.

Constant monitoring of all trends.

Analysis and detection of hazards and new opportunities.

Assessment of the importance and urgency of solving newly emerging tasks on the basis of their classification: a) the most urgent and important tasks requiring immediate solution; b) important tasks of medium urgency, which can be solved within the next planning cycle; c) important, but non-urgent tasks requiring constant monitoring; d) tasks that are false alarms and not worthy of attention.

Preparation of decisions (it is carried out by specially created operational groups).

Making decisions based on possible strategic and tactical implications (provides leadership).

Updating the list of problems and their priority.

Weak signal control. Obvious and specific problems identified by observation are called strong signals. Other problems, known for their early and imprecise indications, are commonly referred to as weak signals. The stronger the signal, the less time the facility has to respond. The process for the enterprise to respond to weak signals of a problem is shown in Figure 2.

On a strong signal, an enterprise can act decisively, for example, stop further building up capacities and reorient to use them for another purpose. The response to a weak signal can be extended over time and intensify as the signal grows.

Management in the face of strategic surprises. The emergency response system for strategic surprises is used in emergency situations that have arisen suddenly; when new tasks are set that do not correspond to past experience and the lack of solutions (for example) leads to major damage.

This system assumes the following actions:

use of a switching network for emergency situations;

redistribution of responsibilities of top management: control and preservation of the moral climate; routine work with minimal disruption; emergency action;

creation of flexible ranking groups from the most experienced specialists, endowed with the necessary powers; their duties include constant monitoring, analysis and assessment of the situation, development of the necessary operational decisions, taking into account their possible consequences; such groups have a special status and operate contrary to the existing hierarchy in the organization.

The considered systems (types) of strategic management do not replace each other. Each of them is used in certain conditions, depending on the degree of instability of the external environment.

Preconditions for the emergence of strategic management

For the first time methods strategic management were developed in the United States in the early 1970s. consulting firm McKincey and applied in practice in 1972 in companies General Electric, IBM, Coca- Cola and others. In the early 1980s. they have already been used by almost half of the large corporations.

The theoretical foundations of strategic management were the following concepts:

1) "Future-oriented corporation"; it became widespread in the mid-1960s. and viewed the internal structure of the firm and the surrounding socio-economic and technological environment as a whole. Initially, the emphasis was on flexible adaptation of the company to the environment, then - on its active change;

2) "Management by objectives"; it was assumed that the goals (for example, of divisions) are adjusted based on real circumstances and the capabilities of personnel to implement them;

3) "Situational approach"; in accordance with it, management is a reaction to the influence of circumstances. It involves the solution of emerging problems, taking into account the interaction of the internal and external environment (what was the emphasis), existing restrictions, the qualifications of managers, the adopted leadership style;

4) "Ecological school", which raised the question of the organic relationship between the firm and the environment and ensuring the survival of the company within its framework as the main task of management activity;

5) " organizations serving the environment "; in the center was the provision on the need to adapt the company to the environment when it changes by restructuring goals;

6) "Marketing", who said that the company should not impose its products on the market, but proceed in its activities from the needs of customers, rebuild the entire production system in accordance with them;

7) "Strategic planning", it is aimed at identifying and analyzing strategic problems, setting goals, determining long-term development guidelines, a course of action, and redistributing resources accordingly.

As an academic discipline, strategic management began to take shape after the publication of the books by R. Rumelt "Strategy, structure and result" (1974) and "Competitive strategy" by M. Porter (1980).

Development stages of corporate planning

The emergence of strategic management techniques and their use in practice are most easily understood in a historical context. Business historians usually identify four stages in the development of corporate planning: budgeting, long-term planning, strategic planning, and strategic management.

Budgeting. Before World War II, special planning services, especially long-term planning, were not created in companies. The top executives of corporations regularly discussed and outlined plans for the development of their business, but formal planning was limited only to drawing up annual financial estimates - budgets by item of expenditure for various purposes. A feature of budgetary and financial methods is their short-term nature and internal orientation, i.e. the organization in this case is considered as a closed system. When using only fiscal methods, the main concern of managers is operating profit and cost structure. The choice of such priorities poses a threat to the long-term development of the organization.

Long-term planning. In the 1950s - early 1960s. characteristic conditions for the management of American companies were high growth rates of commodity markets, relatively high predictability of trends in the development of the national economy. These factors made it necessary to expand the planning horizon and created conditions for the development of long-term planning. The main idea of ​​the method is to make a forecast of the company's sales for several years ahead. At the same time, due to the slow increase in the characteristics of the variability of the external environment, long-term planning was based on the extrapolation of the firm's development trends in the past. The main indicator - the sales forecast - was based on the extrapolation of sales in previous years. The main task of managers was to identify financial problems limiting the growth of the firm.

Strategic planning. In the late 1960s, the economic environment in many industrialized countries changed significantly. As the crisis intensified and international competition intensified, forecasts based on extrapolation began to diverge more and more from real figures. Thus, it turned out that long-term planning does not work in a dynamically changing external environment and fierce competition. In the system of strategic planning, there is no assumption that the future must certainly be better than the past, and the premise of the possibility of studying the future by extrapolation is rejected. The different understanding by managers of the role of external factors is the main difference between long-term and strategic planning. At the forefront of strategic planning is the analysis of both the internal capabilities of the organization and external competitive forces and the search for ways to use external opportunities, taking into account the specifics of the organization. Thus, we can say that the purpose of strategic planning is to improve the response of the enterprise to the dynamics and behavior of competitors.

Strategic management. By the 1990s, most corporations around the world had begun the transition from strategic planning to strategic management. Strategic management is defined as a set of not only strategic management decisions that determine the long-term development of an organization, but also concrete actions, ensuring a quick response of the enterprise to changes in the external environment, which may entail the need for strategic maneuver, revision of goals and adjustment of the general direction of development.

Thus, strategic management is an an efficiently oriented system that includes the process of implementing the strategy, as well as assessment and control. Moreover, the implementation of the strategy is a key part of strategic management, since in the absence of implementation mechanisms, the strategic plan remains only a fantasy.

The essence, subject and objectives of strategic management

Strategic management is an activity that consists in choosing the scope and system of actions to achieve the long-term goals of an organization in a constantly changing environment.

This is the area of ​​activity of the top management of the company, the main responsibility of which is to determine the preferred directions for the development of the organization, setting fundamental goals, optimal allocation of resources, using everything that gives the organization a competitive advantage.

Strategic management acts as a process through which the organization interacts with its environment. At the same time, strategic management is an area of ​​knowledge about techniques, tools, methodology for making strategic decisions and ways of their practical implementation. Strategic management activities are associated with setting the goals and objectives of the organization, as well as maintaining relationships between the organization and the environment that help it achieve its goals, match its internal capabilities and allow it to remain receptive to changes in the external environment.

Strategic management solves the following tasks:

Overcoming the crisis state of the company caused by the discrepancy between its capabilities and the requirements of the environment for occupying a leading position in the market (in the industry) in the future;

Ensuring resilience in any most unexpected situation;

Creation of conditions for long-term development, taking into account external and internal opportunities.

The main principles of strategic management are:

1) The assumption of the unity of the company and the environment, used in setting the main goals and objectives, creating a program for their implementation.

2) Focus on the implementation of the vision of the future, the mission of the company, its global quality goals, the achievement of competitiveness.

3) Taking into account, when forming and choosing strategies, the characteristics of the markets in which it operates, its strategic potential.

To date, it has come to light two approaches to strategic management.

Traditional approach assumes that firms use their strengths for a strategic breakthrough in the existing competitive environment, the opportunities that open before them.

Modern approach consists in the fact that companies, manipulating their resources, themselves form for themselves such an external environment, the needs of which they can satisfy with the greatest benefit for themselves. For example, monopolies, reducing the supply of their products and creating an artificial shortage, have the ability to overcharge and extract excess profits.

In other words, the emphasis is gradually shifting from actions related to preparing for the future to actions aimed at its purposeful formation. At the same time, reliance is placed on personnel as the most valuable resource of the company, information systems, and constant restructuring.

The subject of strategic management is strategic process, which includes the following steps:

1) study of the internal and external environment of the firm, within which it operates (strategic analysis);

2) defining the mission, setting goals, formulating strategies and considering alternatives and finally choosing and drawing up appropriate plans (strategic planning);

3) development of a new organizational structure and management system, practical activities to achieve the set goals, including in unforeseen situations, transforming the company into a new state, assessing its results, adjusting further steps (managing the implementation of strategies and plans, or strategic management in the narrow sense ).

Strategic decisions

Strategic management is based on strategic decisions.

Strategic decisions Are management decisions that:

are future-oriented and lay the foundation for making operational management decisions;

are associated with significant uncertainty, since they take into account uncontrollable external factors affecting the enterprise;

involve significant resources and can have extremely serious, long-term consequences for the enterprise.

Key features of strategic decisions:

innovativeness;

focus on the promising goals of the enterprise, for the future, and not for the present;

uncertainty;

many alternatives;

there is no hard time frame for implementation;

long-term consequences.

subjectivity.

The need for the formation of strategic management in Russia

At present, in the economic practice of Russia, the mechanism of strategic management is going through a period of formation. At the same time, domestic and international analysts believe that the Russian market has entered the stage when the absence of a developed strategy prevents enterprises from operating and developing steadily. The short-term strategic decisions that brought success to some companies just after 1991 are no longer working. Therefore, company leaders are gradually coming to understand the need to develop a development strategy. This is facilitated by the identification of the enterprise as an integral isolated system, the formation of new goals and interests of the enterprise and its employees.

Rapid changes in the external environment also stimulate the emergence of new methods, systems and approaches to management in domestic enterprises. If the external environment is stable, then there is no particular need to engage in strategic management. However, at present, most Russian enterprises operate in a rapidly changing and difficult to predict environment, and, therefore, are in dire need of strategic management methods.

The need for the formation of a strategic management system in domestic practice is also conditioned by the ongoing integration processes. Financial and industrial groups are emerging in Russian business, uniting technologically related enterprises. Even small businesses, in order to successfully operate, unite in corporations, which are called small diversified ones.

The next important prerequisite for the development of strategic management is the process of business globalization, which inevitably affected our country. Large companies view the world as a single market space, where national differences and preferences are erased, and consumption is standardized. Products from companies such as Mars, Siemens, Sony, Procter& Gamble, L’ Oreal and many others are sold in all countries of the world and are an important factor in competition in national markets. It is possible to resist the onslaught of the goods of large companies only by acting in similar ways, i.e. developing a strategy for working in a competitive environment.

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The reasons for the emergence of strategic management.

The emergence of strategic management in Russia is caused by objective reasons arising from changes in the nature of the environment of enterprises. This is due to a number of factors.

The first group of such factors is due to global trends in the development of a market economy. These include: internationalization and globalization of business; new unexpected business opportunities created by advances in science and technology; development of information networks that make possible the lightning-fast dissemination and receipt of information; wide availability of modern technologies; changing the role of human resources; increasing competition for resources; acceleration of changes in the environment.

The second group of factors stems from those transformations in the system of economic management in Russia that occurred during the transition to a market model of management, mass privatization of enterprises in almost all industries. As a result, the entire higher layer of management structures, which was busy collecting information, developing a long-term strategy and directions for the development of individual industries and industries, was eliminated.

One can relate differently to the already non-existent sectoral ministries, planning bodies, but it cannot be denied that, having a powerful network of sectoral and departmental institutions, they carried out practically the entire scope of work to develop promising directions for the development of enterprises, transforming them into promising current plans, which from above communicated to the performers. The task of the management of the enterprises was mainly in the implementation of operational functions for organizing the execution of tasks sent from above.

As a result of the rapid elimination of the upper layer of enterprise management in combination with privatization, when the state abandoned the management of the overwhelming majority of enterprises, all the functions that were previously performed by higher bodies were automatically transferred to the management of associations and firms. Naturally, the management and internal organization of enterprises turned out to be in most cases unprepared for such activities.

The third group of factors is associated with the emergence of a huge number of economic structures of various forms of ownership, when a mass of unprepared for professional managerial activities came into the field of entrepreneurship, which predetermined the need for accelerated assimilation by the latter of the theory and practice of strategic management.

The fourth group of factors, which is also of a purely Russian character, is due to the general socio-economic situation that has developed during the transition period from a planned to a market economy. This situation is characterized by a decline in production, painful restructuring of the economy, massive non-payments, inflation, growing unemployment and other negative phenomena. All this extremely complicates the activities of economic organizations, is accompanied by a growing wave of bankruptcies, etc. Naturally, what is happening in the country's economy predetermines the need for increased attention to the problems of strategic management, which in turn should ensure the survival of enterprises in extreme conditions. It is no coincidence that a number of authors put forward the thesis that in such a situation one should speak first of all about the strategy of survival and only then about the strategy of development.

Turning to strategy becomes vital when, for example, there are sudden changes in the external environment of the firm. They can be caused by: saturation of demand; major changes in technology inside or outside the firm; the unexpected emergence of numerous new competitors.

In situations like this, the traditional principles and experience of the organization are inadequate to meet the challenge of exploiting new opportunities and fail to prevent hazards. If an organization does not have a unified strategy, then it is possible that its various divisions will develop heterogeneous, contradictory and ineffective solutions: the sales service will fight to revive the previous demand for the company's products, production units will make capital investments in the automation of obsolete industries, and the R&D service will develop new products based on old technology. This will lead to conflicts, slow down the reorientation of the firm and make its work irregular and ineffective. It may turn out that the reorientation has begun too late to guarantee the firm's survival.

Faced with such difficulties, the firm must solve two extremely difficult problems: choose the right direction of development from numerous alternatives and direct the efforts of the team in the right direction.

However, it should be noted that, along with clear advantages, strategic management has a number of disadvantages and limitations on its use, which show that this type of management, as well as others, does not have universality of application for solving any problems in any situations.

First, strategic management, by its very nature, does not (and cannot) give an accurate and detailed picture of the future. The future desired state of the organization formed in strategic management is not a detailed description of its internal and external position, but the wish of the state of the organization in the future, what position to occupy in the market and in business, what organizational culture to have, in which business groups enter, etc. Moreover, all this taken together should determine whether or not the organization will survive in the future in the competitive struggle.

Secondly, strategic management cannot be reduced to a set of routine procedures and schemes. He does not have a descriptive theory that substantiates what and how to do in solving certain problems or in specific situations. Strategic management is a certain philosophy or ideology of business and management, and each manager understands and implements it in his own way.

Of course, there are a number of guidelines, rules, and logical frameworks for problem analysis and strategy selection, as well as strategic planning and strategy implementation. However, in general, strategic management is a symbiosis of intuition and the art of top management to lead the organization to strategic goals, high professionalism and creativity of employees, ensuring the connection of the organization with the environment, updating the organization and its products, as well as the implementation of current plans and, finally, the active involvement of all employees. in the implementation of the objectives of the organization, in the search for the best ways to achieve its goals.

Third, it takes a huge effort and a large investment of time and resources in order for the organization to begin the strategic management process. The creation and implementation of strategic planning is necessary, which is fundamentally different from the development of long-term plans that are binding on any conditions. The strategic plan must be flexible, responsive to changes inside and outside the organization, which requires a lot of effort and high costs. It is also necessary to create services dealing with the study of the external environment. Marketing services in modern conditions are becoming extremely important and require significant additional costs.

Fourth, the negative consequences of mistakes in strategic foresight are sharply increasing. In a situation where completely new products are created on a tight schedule, new business opportunities suddenly arise and opportunities that have existed for many years disappear before our eyes. The price of reckoning for incorrect foresight and, accordingly, for mistakes in strategic choice becomes often fatal for the organization. Particularly tragic are the consequences of an incorrect forecast for organizations that carry out an uncontested way of functioning or implement a strategy that cannot be fundamentally corrected.

Fifth, in the implementation of strategic management, the main emphasis is often placed on strategic planning, while the most important component of strategic management is the implementation of the strategic plan. This presupposes, first of all, the creation of an organizational culture that makes it possible to implement a strategy, systems of motivation and work organization, as well as a certain flexibility in the organization.

In strategic management, the execution process has an active feedback loop on planning, which further enhances the importance of the execution phase. Therefore, an organization, in principle, will not be able to move to strategic management, even if it has a very good strategic planning subsystem, but there are no prerequisites or opportunities for creating a strategic execution subsystem.

The evolution of internal management systems makes it possible to understand that successive systems correspond to the growing level of instability (uncertainty) of the external environment. Since the beginning of the XX century, two types of enterprise management systems have developed: management based on control over performance (post factum) and management based on extrapolation of the past. By now, two types of control systems have developed:

The first one is based on the determination of the position (management based on the anticipation of changes, when unexpected phenomena began to arise and the rate of change accelerated, but not so much that it was impossible to determine the reaction to them in time). This type includes: long-term and strategic planning; management through the choice of strategic positions;

The second is associated with a timely response, provides a response to rapid and unexpected changes in the environment (management based on flexible emergency solutions). This type includes: management based on the ranking of strategic objectives; strong and weak signal control; management in the face of strategic surprises.

The choice of combinations of different systems for a particular enterprise depends on the conditions of the environment in which it operates. The choice of the positioning system is due to the novelty and complexity of the tasks. The choice of a timely response system depends on the pace of change and the predictability of the tasks. The synthesis and integration of these control systems make it possible to form a strategic management method that most fully meets the conditions of flexibility and uncertainty of the external environment.