Corporate Strategic Planning

With the Global market turning more violent and uncertain day by day, the business leaders throughout the world are constantly evolving their plans, and are reacting to risks and at the same time opportunities that are occurring, while making strategically consistent corporate choices. In recent times, a lot of companies are running under a model called top-down strategic planning, where the executives first form the strategies, and then communicate it down to lower level officers for its proper implementation. But for larger corporations, the strategy is focused upon the business portfolio part.

In the grass root level, a company's main mission is projecting a favorable image to the customers in order to increase sales or to turn one time customers into repeat customers. Proper corporate strategy planning involves deciding upon where the company should go, and it gives a sense of purpose to its employees.

When a firm is ready with its objectives, it begins with the current situation it is in to formulate a proper corporate strategic plan. The company should fully know their own capabilities and limitations, and thus analysis is required not only of external, but also of internal environment. External analysis includes macro environment, which affects all firms and micro environment that affect the firms in a particular industry niche only. The internal analysis is all about the company image, the culture, and structure, contracts, awareness, shares, efficiency and experience curve.

Once they have a clear understanding of their position as a result of this analysis, strategies are made. Specific focus, differentiation and cost leadership are three basic strategies practiced by many a corporation. The strategy is to be translated into specific areas like human resource, R&D, Marketing and Production. Corporate strategic planning can help a company create their goals for future times. Planning which is done by senior managers can determine the fate of the company.

The management process is a recurring one. If for example, component is changed, the entire strategy might get affected. The best advice in this case can be to practice permutation and combination until the strategy adapts well with environmental changes. But once decided upon the corporate strategy planning, it should be evaluated with changes made, and control systems should be introduced, the performance should be measured and actions are to be taken to achieve success.

The corporate strategy planning explained above is more in sync with stable kind of environments. It can be pretty problematic and chaotic for the rapidly changing ones. This is one of its greatest drawbacks. Another loophole of this process that it takes into account that there will always be favorable conditions, and does not forecast any undesirable or unexpected events. And the world market place being turning into more and more unpredictable day by day, it is not wise to completely rely upon long term forecast, for all companies of any shape and size, belonging to any part of the world. A solid direction is all that is needed to reach the pinnacle and for the goals to be achieved.