Distinguish between strategic planning, strategic management, strategy formulation, and strategy implementation.?

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the strategy. Strategic planning became prominent in corporations during the 1960s and remains an important aspect of strategic management. It is executed by strategic planners or strategists, who involve many parties and research sources in their analysis of the organization and its relationship to the environment in which it competes.

Strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by a company's top management on behalf of owners, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization competes.

 strategy formulation: A strategy is a broad plan developed by an organization to take it from where it is to where it wants to be. A well-designed strategy will help an organization reach its maximum level of effectiveness in reaching its goals while constantly allowing it to monitor its environment to adapt the strategy as necessary. Strategy formulation is the process of developing the strategy.

Strategic implementation put simply is the process that puts plans and strategies into action to reach goals. A strategic plan is a written document that lays out the plans of the business to reach goals, but will sit forgotten without strategic implementation. The implementation makes the company’s plans happen.

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: - This is a continuous process of strategic analysis, strategy creation, implementation and monitoring, used by organizations with the purpose to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.

The general purpose of doing it is to combine the energy of organization’s functional areas into one focused effort to achieve superior performance.

It answers the following 3 questions:

• Where the organization is at the moment?
• Where does it want to go?
• How it will get there?

Strategic management is not about predicting the future, but about preparing for it and knowing what exact steps the company will have to take to implement its strategic plan and achieve a competitive advantage.

STRATEGIC PLANNING: - This is a process and thus has inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes. This process, like all processes, has constraints. It may be formal or informal and is typically iterative, with feedback loops throughout the process. Some elements of the process may be continuous and others may be executed as discrete projects with a definitive start and end during a period. Strategic planning provides inputs for strategic thinking, which guides the actual strategy formation. The end result is the organization's strategy, including a diagnosis of the environment and competitive situation, a guiding policy on what the organization intends to accomplish, and key initiatives or action plans for achieving the guiding policy.

Michael Porter wrote in 1980 that formulation of competitive strategy includes consideration of four key elements:

1.     Company strengths and weaknesses;

2.     Personal values of the key implementers (i.e., management and the board);

3.     Industry opportunities and threats; and

4.     Broader societal expectations.

The first two elements relate to factors internal to the company (i.e., the internal environment), while the latter two relate to factors external to the company (i.e., the external environment). These elements are considered throughout the strategic planning process.

STRATEGY FORMULATION: - This is concerned with the crafting and designing of strategies, and picking the best strategy for execution, in order to achieve the desired organizational goals and objectives. It is the second stage of the Strategic Management Process. The following are the three major aspects of Strategy Formulation:

• Corporate Level Strategy
• Business Level or Competitive Level Strategy
• Functional Level Strategy

STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION: - This is the third and final phase of Stage of Strategic Management Process, where the formulated strategy is put into action to meet out the organizational goals and objectives. Strategy Implementation is a process of converting planned decisions into action. It includes directing the ongoing strategy so that it can work in an efficient manner and taking corrective measures to improve its performance time to time, to reach the targeted results. The following activities are involved in it:

• Allocation of resources like man, material, money, machinery etc.
• Designing the organizational structure for handling new strategy.
• Training manpower.
• Ascertaining functional process.
• Devising system in the organization.

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