CS Advanced Level
Strategic Management cheat sheet
Every chapter's key points, formulas and definitions on one page, for the last week before the exam. Each heading links to the chapter that explains it.
Overview of strategic management
- Strategy is the long-term direction and scope of an organisation, which achieves advantage in a changing environment through its configuration of resources and competences, with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations.
- Strategy is long-term, organisation-wide, involves major resource commitments and is difficult and costly to reverse once set in motion.
- The three strategy lenses see strategy differently: the design lens as deliberate, top-down analysis and planning, the experience lens as building on experience and culture, and the ideas lens as emerging from variety and innovation throughout the organisation.
- Realised strategy is deliberate strategy plus emergent strategy, so an organisation's actual strategy can only be read from what it did, not from its plan.
- Strategic decisions are long-term, organisation-wide, hard to reverse and set by top management or the board; tactical decisions are short to medium-term, departmental and set by middle management.
Key terms
- Design lens
- Views strategy as a deliberate, rational process of analysis and planning by top management.
- Experience lens
- Views strategy as building incrementally on individual and organisational experience and culture, rather than pure analysis.
- Ideas lens
- Views strategy as emerging from variety and innovation generated throughout the organisation, not only decided at the top.
- Deliberate strategy
- Develops through intended, planned action (the design lens), covered in depth in the chapter on strategy development processes.
- Emergent strategy
- Develops as a pattern that emerges from a stream of actions over time, not fully planned in advance, as the chapter on strategy development processes explains.
The rest of the sheet covers
- History of the organisation and its culture
- Strategy levels and strategic intent
- The strategic management process
- Strategic analysis: the external environment
- Strategic analysis: the internal environment
- Business strategy and business models
- Corporate strategy and diversification
- International strategy
- Strategy development processes
- Matching organisational structure to strategy
- Leadership and strategic change
- The practice of strategy
- Strategic control
- Contemporary issues and case studies
- Exam technique and revision
- Glossary