Strategic Direction

Strategy is the means by which an organisation moves to attain its long-term aims. Many directors and senior managers have been known to confuse organisational aims as strategy. At IBC, we would best define strategy as HOW directors and senior managers achieve the aims of the business or organisation.

Strategy is fundamental to organisations as it can help achieve sustainable competitive advantage through alignment of the organisational resources and competences. An effective strategy, if implemented successfully, will help to ensure the success of a business or organisation; conversely, a poor strategy will ultimately lead to the failure of the business or organisation, irrespective of size or how well established the business has become, as evidenced by the failure of literally thousands of SME's every year and major gobal (formerly highly successful) corporations, such as Xerox.

Hofer and Schendel (cited in Wilson and Gilligan, 1997, p.27) have identified three types of strategy: corporate, business and functional level strategy. Business strategy is a function of an organisation’s SBU and is one of the five key variables of operational performance detailed in figure 1.1, a management model used to help optimise organisational performance by keeping the variables in perspective (Hanna, 1988 p.40):

The strategic management process consists of analysis, formulation and implementation. At IBC, we recognise that successful strategy formulation to benefit an organisation and, ultimately, its stakeholders depends on the organisation’s Internal (micro) Environment, encompassing core values, purpose, goals, resources, capabilities, structure and processes; and External (macro) Environment, encompassing the General and Competitive-Environments, with strategy as the key lynchpin (Henry, 2008), appositely graphically demonstrated by figure 1.2:

At IBC, we truly understand strategy and its importance to every business and organisation; we work together with our client to ensure that a successful strategy is devised and, importantly, implemented effectively  - as even the best strategy can still fail unless the latter is achieved.

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