Strategic Management and New Managers\'

Strategic Management and New Managers' Approach to Success

The concept of strategic management has become incrementally popular across the past few years. And evidence in this direction stands its every day broader implementation, as well as its increasing popularity within the specialized literature. Researchers and various academicians have dedicated countless pages to defining and explaining the concept of strategic management, as well as recommending the best courses of action to implementing strategic management.

Having recognized the tremendous importance of strategic leadership, as forwarded by the specialized literature, one is now brought up to a point of curiosity of identifying the actual practicality of the concept, and not only in general, but in this specific modern environment of globalization and market liberalization, organizational and individual dependency on Information Technology, the emergence and effects of the internationalized economic crisis, the treatment of employees as the organizations' most valuable asset, the centric role of customer satisfaction, as well as the necessity to achieve organizational goals through the satisfaction of the needs forwarded by various stakeholder categories.

A modern day manager would typically comprehend and recognize the above mentioned characteristics of nowadays' business climate. It is then expected that the ability of the modern day manager to identify and decide based on modern day challenges becomes combined with the teachings of the academic community. The study will then strive to answer questions regarding the capacity of the modern day leader to develop and implement the most adequate strategic management decisions, which satisfy the growing needs of the numerous stakeholder categories, while in the same time achieve the financial and non-financial scopes of the entity. In other words: is the modern day manager able to implement strategic management functions to succeed in this challenging context?

The answer to the posed question, and many intermediary ones, will be drawn from three main sources. The first will be constituted by the personal previous works of the author, focusing either on strategic management, either on challenges of the modern day society, and the managerial means of responding to these challenges. The second source will be constituted by the literary works of both academicians as well as average editorialists. The works of editorialists will generally be consulted to identify an additional opinion, but the accuracy of the information retrieved will be checked in peer-reviewed articles. These secondary sources will offer a literary background on the issue researched, as well as a starting point. Abagail McWilliams, David D. Van Fleet and Patrick Wright (2001) for instance researched the applicability of strategic management in managing the organizational staff members in a means that creates a comparative advantage at a global level. Robert W. Service (2006) on the other hand refers to the broader concept of strategic intelligence and analyses it from a managerial standpoint. Alen Badal (2005) then promotes the belief that it is imperative for the success of a modern day manager that he be able to understand and implement interdisciplinary thinking in order to enhance the quality of an organizational strategy, and as such the success rates of the entire organization. These three studies, alongside with several others, will constitute the literary background, as well as the starting point and the ability of identifying more constructive research interrogations.

The third source of retrieving information will be constituted by the very organizational context. In this order of ideas, the researcher of the study will engage in open communications with organizational leaders and will strive to find answers to questions referring to the ability of modern day managers to identify and respond to the emergent challenges in nowadays' business community, as well as their own understanding and implementation of the concepts and principles of strategic management -- alone and in dealing with the emergent challenges. The scope at this level will be that of conversing with as many managers as possible. It is expected that several impediments be encountered, but these should not impact with the purpose or outcome of the study.

The four-year period assigned to the completion of this research project would be divided into four stages, each dedicated to a specific task. In this order of ideas, the first year will be allocated to conducting the research of the already existent literature theory. By the end of this stage, a theoretical background would be created, and the research questions would be formed. The second stage consists of six months and is allocated to the analysis of the author's previous works in the field of strategic management, modern day management and modern day challenges. It will be necessary to identify any useful information or conclusions retrieved in the past researches.