Stakeholders in strategic management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Stakeholders in strategic management - Essay Example In fact any commercial organization can blueprint a very wide constituency of its stakeholders. It's not a misnomer to call such interests as stakeholders- a connotation which is far superior to that of a lender. In fact the term stakeholders itself indicates that the organization concerned functions with such stakes in mind. Therefore no organization can afford to function ignoring its stakeholders. In fact it consciously builds within its policies, obectives and reporting systems accountability to such stakeholders and often takes up structured reporting to communicate the extent to which such interests are protected. On the obverse side of the coin, strategic management is scientific practice of ensuring that any organization not only functions remaining on course to achievement of its vision and long term objectives but also that such objectives and visions can be broadened, widened and deepened according to changing environmental realities. While stakeholders are also scattered in its environment generally most organizations view the essence of strategy formulation as coping with competition (Porter, 1979) and they formulate a strategic structure accordingly (Chandler, 1962). This is rather a narrow view of strategy making which only reckons with competition. In fact both management strategies and business strategies should coalesce to form one unique strategy that addresses and monitors the interests of all stakeholders as the organization competes and grows. Strategic Construct Any strategic action plan has to be supported on the constructional skeleton of strategies, tactics and structure. Several strategic constructs have been put forward; however very few are exhaustive enough to ensure a complete environmental scan so as to consciously build stakeholders' concerns. Stephen Haines' Centre for Strategic Management has built a new strategic planning system based on systems thinking and calls it the 21st Century Yearly Strategic Management System and Cycle. This system moves beyond planning into implementation. It includes a Plan-to Plan phase and a Plan-to-Implement phase. The steps include team building and leadership skill building as part of the planning. It also includes a parallel process whereby all key stakeholders are involved based on the premise that 'People support what they help create'. This process starts with a Futuristic Environmental Scan and defines the ideal vision in terms of mission, values and end outcomes that the organization wishe s to set for itself. Only after the statement of such Ideal Future a Current State assessment based on SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is taken up to identify the gaps and make strategies to close the gap(s).As a result of their clients adopting this model it was found that clients began developing competitive edge and the organization was much clearer on what their competitive "positioning" in market place was and found themselves moving positively in that direction, to the delight of their customers(Haines,2004).Thus this process leans directly into the process of competitive strategy making as it includes