Strategic Management Process. In One

¶ … strategic management process.

In one word, this question can be answered as such: focus. Indeed, a mission statement offers the company and the employees working there the focus they need in order to properly complete their work and efficiently commit to their activity in the company. As an overarching direction, the mission statement will always help people refer to a word or a sentence that represents the intrinsic credo of the company and its management.

The mission statement is also the initial, incipient stage in the strategic management process and the decision making process. This means that every strategic objective and every strategic plan that the company's decision makers come up with need to be confronted with the mission statement and, only if these are in line with it should they be adopted. As such, the mission statement also plays the guiding role in the strategic management process, as something that one can turn to and compare the direction given by a certain strategic decision with the overarching direction that the mission statement gives.

In many cases, the mission statement is very simple, sometimes even just a single word. The mission statement for Xerox is 'quality'. As mentioned, a very simple word, but a word that has huge meaning in the context of an industry that is continuously competitive. All the products that Xerox builds will be checked and referred against this mission statement: does this product respect the quality standards that our company abides by? Further more, all strategic developments of the company and any decision in the strategic management process will need to also abide by this overarching, general rule impose by the mission statement: quality.

In other cases, the mission statement is a longer sentence in which the company is making certain commitments, extremely useful in its relation with both its customer and the investors on the market. It shows a clear way that the company has decided to go by and will increase confidence among these shareholders (customers, investors) that the company seriously takes this into consideration when making its decisions and that the mission statement is included in the strategic management process by the decision makers in the company.