Strategic management definition is more or less the same as what strategy is. As strategies could not happen just by themselves, strategic management underlines the importance of the regard on strategy of managers (Johnson et al. 2009). It requires qualities, which are contradictory, and skills to deal with the demand of the context, it pay attention on three groups: the corporation, the customer, and the competitors (Joyce and Woods 2001), so the perfect strategic management is hard to do. Lynch (2009) describes this discipline, the strategic management, like the identification of the aspiration of an organisation and the ways to achieve it.
With a look of the managers on the analysis, decisions and actions on the organisation (Dess et al. 2005), they can find, sustain and create competitive advantages on the other competitors. The strategic management process is, as Dess and Miller (1993) show, founded by considering the organisation’s goals, exploring the external environment opportunities and studying the internal strengths and weaknesses of the company. Understood, the strategic position of an organisation is done by this analysis of the internal and the external environment (Johnson et al. 2011 and 2009 and Dess et al. 2005). Afterwards leaders make decisions in order to formulate the way to go, this is the strategic choice (Johnson et al. 2011); it assigns the functional, the business, the corporate and the international levels of the organisation (Dess and Miller 1993). Thus the action is taken; in this last part of the process Dess and Miller (1993), Faulkner and Campbell (2003), and Thompson and Martin (2005) talk about implementation. Thompson and Martin (2005) add that creativity and innovation are needed in this process, so as to ensure the organisation is responsive to pressures of change. Furthermore they insert the idea of the ability to manage the strategic changes, innovation and change concern the strategic process in an organisation. So, managers ensure that the strategies are achievable and workable in practice (Johnson et al. 2009), so as to win against the competitors.
Moreover Dess et al. (2005) develop different keys attributed to strategic management; they listed four. The first one is that the strategic management is managing toward complete organisational goals and objectives that is why the strategic issues are from organisations’ perspectives. Furthermore this discipline “includes multiple stakeholders in decision making” as Dess et al. (2005 p.10) asserts. The perspectives on both long-term and short-term are thereafter joined and required, in strategic management. In the last fourth one, strategic management involves the recognition of an agreement among effectiveness and efficiency.
Companies have the opportunity to choose the strategy they want to use, there are different approaches achievable. As Macmillan and Tampoe (2000) state there are several ways to manage strategy thanks to different school of thought. Indeed, two main types of strategy are used: the deliberate strategies and the emergent ones. Campbell et al. (2002) and Macmillan and Tampoe (2000) to define the different schools of thought refer to both Wittington and Mintzberg’s approaches. Four different schools of thought are describing by Whittington (2001) and Elliott (2011): the classical, the processual, the evolutionary and the systemic. Those four approaches differ along two dimensions; Whittington (2001) hands over the outcomes of strategy and the process by which this is made. It is possible to aggregate the classical and the systemic schools because they are long-term planned strategy and it emerges as learning: deliberate-processed strategies, however, as emergent-processed strategies, Whittington (2001) associates the processual and the evolutionary one, which all depend on the social context. According to Mintzberg et al. (2009) the design, the planning and the positioning schools are perspective schools, as confirm Campbell et al. (2002). And there are descriptive schools.
So according to Whittington (2001) for the classical school, the planning can adapt and anticipate the market changes, whereas in the evolutionary one markets are too rigid and too unpredictable for the investment of the company in a strategic plan. The processualists use effective strategies; which emerge directly from intimate involvement and in basic strengths of the organisation. Finally, the systemic approaches argue that strategies must be “sociologically efficient”, appropriate to particular social context (Whittington 2001 p.10).
Strategy in organisations has different ways to develop itself, Mintzberg (1990) starts the debate by discussing and critiquing the design school; thereafter he presents the emerging strategy school. Johnson et al. (2009) relate that there are in the strategy development two large explanation: the rational-analytic view and the emergent strategy. While Campbell et al. (2002) oppose the notions of planned or perspective strategy to the emergent one and Mintzberg and Waters (2004) talk about the deliberate and the emergent strategy. Beside, De Wit and Meyer (2010) highlight that there is a paradox of deliberateness and emergence. For Mintzberg et al. (2009), there are prescriptive schools: the design, planning and positioning schools, and descriptive schools like the entrepreneurial, cognitive, learning, power, cultural and environmental schools. It exists as well the configuration school of thought, which combine both prescriptive and descriptive ones.
In a same way the deliberate and the planned approaches of the strategy view the formulation and the implementation of strategic management as a “logical, rational and systematic process” (Campbell et al. 2002 p.293). In this process the formulation of the strategy is easy, it is implementation that is difficult to achieve, Faulkner and Campbell (2003), in their critics of rationalism, use the example of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, it might be assumed that there was a failure in the strategy or in the implementation. Mintzberg and Waters (2004), Johnson et al. (2009) and Campbell et al. (2002) agree on the evidence that, in a pure deliberate strategy, finding intentions by providing objectives focus on the business is the first step. Afterwards so as to measure and monitor the performance, the person in charge translates objectives into targets. Then, Mintzberg and Waters (2004 p.18) argue that those objectives are collective intentions and they must be realised “exactly as intended” without not any help from the external environment. The emergent or the incremental strategy adopts the position that strategy must be developed incrementally over time in the absence of a strict planning. De Wit and Meyer (2010) indicate that a strategy emerges where there are no plans, or the people, with their strategic behaviour, divert from their plans. But Mintzberg and Waters (2004) underline the fact that this is had to imagine the action without intention. However a broad number of advantages come out with the emergent strategy approach; De Wit and Meyer (2010) note while strategy emerges there are opportunism, flexibility, entrepreneurship, support and learning in the organisation. Campbell et al. (2002) share the same point of view and go farther with the advantage that an emergent strategy can increase flexibility in an agitated environment. A danger exists if there is a lack of clarity in the definition of objectives: a “strategic drift” (Campbell et al. 2002 p.294).
Mintzberg (1996) states, strategy emerges as leaning, so the processual school develops different crafting strategies linked with the history of the organisation, thus in this case the strategy of the company is based on what was done, and then the strategy in improve by learning from the mistakes. As a way to experiment itself the company use this school, which comes from the emergent process. The most relevant schools of thought in Mintzberg et al. (2009) development is the planning school which may be associated with deliberate processed school, and the learning one which corresponds to the emergent view. The planning school is about to plan the future of the company, Mintzberg et al. (2009) argue that this is in order to control the implementation of the actions which were already planned. As to select a strategy to follow a wide investigation is necessary to obtain a good analysis of the expectations, needs and future goals of the company.
Macmillan and Tampoe (2000) assert that the strategy formulation process leads to a chosen strategy, and it is to cause the strategic thinking that conceives the future of the organisation. The strategy creation involves three strands, within Thompson and Martin (2005) view both systematic and formal strategic planning systems and informal are important, so as the vision and the emergent strategy. These three theses reveal two important points: first one is that a deliberate strategy is too formal to allow the development of the creativity, and the second one is that this development must be reliable with the corporate culture and image. However these three modes described above are not mutually exclusive and they are lead together (Thompson and Martin 2005). Lynch (2009) defines the process as how the actions link together or interact as the strategy spread out against what may be changing the environment. For example in the IBM case, the process was the delay in tacking the PC market, as to respond to the competitors actions there is a slow reaction of the organisation to the competitive actions and there are interactions between several parts of the company. It exists two different approaches of the process, Lynch (2009) develops about the perspective approach, where there are objectives define in advance whose main elements has been chosen at the beginning, then he talks about the emergent one, where the final objectives are unclear and so the elements are developing during the strategy proceed. Management and strategy are not “particularly creative fields” as Bilton et al. (2003 p.197) note. In the twentieth century Bilton et al. (2003) show that in the creative intention there are several ways to illustrate management and the deficiency of strategy, the two most effective are that management is considered as a stand-alone subject and more ideas come and offer more effectiveness. Every company has a strategy at anytime, and the strategy formulation process is fundamental to let new strategy happen, Macmillan and Tampoe (2000) agree that a better process should produce a better strategy. Otherwise, good strategies will add value to the company and will develop competitive advantages, so are judged by the result they achieved and not only by the process used to create them.
The origin of the creative process is for McGee et al. (2005) the availability of the high quality creative of individuals or the appropriate level of the investment of the company in research and development. It might be assumed that it is obviously a good way to mix both ideas. As an example it is possible to talk about the Virgin Company, whose core business areas are travel, entertainment and lifestyle. This organisation encourages the employees to take more initiatives against rewards, so that makes people think more creative. Macmillan and Tampoe (2000) strengthen the idea that the creative process is more efficient when employees get responsibilities. It is significant to note that the good will of each member gives importance and value to this useful process in any organisation.
The strategy formulation process results in strategic choice (Macmillan and Tampoe 2000), where four critical elements have to be done during the strategic formulation. Goals need to be set, simple and they have to be long term achievable, the competitive environment requires being perfectly understood, there is objective appraisal of resources, and it is important to have an effective implementation (Macmillan and Tampoe 2000). This process is like a way by which the strategies of a company are derived (Lynch 2009); it can be ambiguous because of the hardness of defining and evaluating the real development.
In any organisations strategy and strategic management are assumed so as to develop the well being of the company itself. With a full analysis of the internal and the external environment a company is able to set goals to execute them and afterwards to implement a process to accomplish them. All around this process there are strategies; which can be used by managers for improving the company’s potentials. In a business it is possible to choose between two kinds of strategies: the deliberate strategy and the emergent strategy, these are pretty opposite ways to analyse the right plan to follow. From all this it could be obvious that the creative process once arise is in relation with the development of the company: the emergent strategy. Because of the long-term planning of a deliberate strategy, the impact of actions is calculated and do not offer space to the creativity. However in the real life neither emergent nor deliberate strategies are especially selected, most of companies mix both or come back on their first choices by adjusting their methods of organisation. Using the employees wills, ideas of change, and their contribution could increase the power of the company. Any ways there will be a creative process in the organisation, even if the emergent strategy, to follow, is not the only one selected.
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