Historically strategy defines the art of war, where specific plans of action to overthrow an enemy were instigated by the generals and their staff. This view of strategy has been generalised, in an organisational sense, to imply that rational strategic planning by top management teams as the main strategists, create the best plans in becoming a leading company within an industry. With this in mind, my position in relation to the statement is that it does not purely constitute a truly successful strategy. Therefore the purpose of this essay is to critically analyse the perspective that a rational and formal approach restricted to top management alone as detrimental to the business in the long run. The structure of this essay will first involve a brief discussion of the rational strategic process and its elements, a discussion of other processes that companies use to formulate strategies, an analysis of whether companies actually use the rational process through corporate examples from Honda and Intel and finally a conclusion.
In Hill, Jones, Galvin and Haidar (2007) a strategy is defined as an action that an organisation takes to attain one or more of its goals. More precisely it can be defined as an action a company takes to attain superior performance. In traditional strategic planning undertaken by organisations, these involve a number of rational and formal actions. Firstly the process involves the formulation of main mission goals, such as their purpose as an organisation and the objectives they wish to achieve in reaching that main goal. This enables the direction and creates a specific pathway for the company to follow. Second, the process involves analysing both the internal and external operating environment in order to assess the strengths and weaknesses they posses as well as the threats and opportunities that surround the organisations ability for success. Thirdly, decisions are made upon which alternatives generate the most success in accordance...