Strategic management focuses on gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage using formulation, implementation, and evaluation of cross-functional decisions to achieve organizational objectives (David & David, 2017).  In order to accomplish this, three stages are used: strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation.  Strategy formulation starts with developing a vision and mission statement, creating a SWOT analysis, deciding on long-term objectives, coming up with strategies to accomplish the objectives, and choosing which strategies to pursue.  Strategy implementation involves taking the strategies decided in the formulation stage and pursuing them in smaller stages such as year increments by allocating resources, motivating employees, preparing budgets, and creating policies.  Strategy evaluation is checking up on the strategy to determine what strategies are working and what strategies need modified.  Evaluation is done on a continuous basis as factors are changing constantly both internally and externally.  Using these processes, our Strategic Plan can be successful for our organization.  First, it will be critical to decide if your plan is to enter a market, expand your business, or merge/acquire another business.  Then, you must create a SWOT analysis to understand the internal and external factors that affect the success/failure of your business.  After this, strategies will need to be thought through to determine which strategies will work best for your type of business.  These strategies will need to be broken into smaller, more attainable goals and decide how to get these goals accomplished.  Lastly, all of the strategies need to be evaluated to determine if they are working or if they need to be adjusted to accomplish the strategy.  Using these processes will allow your business to produce above average returns because it will remind you to evaluate the strategies you are implementing on different time frames to see if what you are doing is working.  For example, I work in the insurance/investment sales business.  If I followed these processes, I would be able to decide if I should focus on current clients or look at a new market of clients to reach out to based on a SWOT analysis.  After this, I would need to decide my timeline for reaching out to the clients and what products I want to propose to them after researching their situations.  Lastly, I would need to evaluate the strategy monthly to see if the clients are coming in based on the work I am doing for them.

References

David, F. R., & David, F. R. (2017). Strategic Management: A Competitive Advantage Approach, Concepts and Cases (Sixteenth ed.). Boston: Prentice Hall.