GSBS6060 Strategic Management
Task
Considering many successful organisations such as “Lincoln Electric” have had difficulty at times to successfully implement a strategic plan, explains why various components for the process of strategic management are interrelated and highlights how these components play such a big part in the overall success of any strategic plan. in 1992, an attempt by Lincoln Electrics to take advantage of an industry wide rush to enter a rapid growing global market for welding products and equipment failed.
This failed attempt was due to LE being underprepared within their SMP and overconfident with their past success relying on their strong competitive advantage to succeed. This combined with some key mistakes including dismissing basic but critical components of a SMP and failing to analyse environmental conditions
throughout the process proved to be very costly for LE (Hastings, D.F 1999).
During LE's attempt to capitalise on this growing market, they failed to implement a SMP that allowed components of their plan to be developed, changed or evolve throughout the process, proving that their plan was ridged thus not becoming a “Living process”. During the Formulation stages, consisting of theinitial 5 steps in a SMP, LE chose to utilise their proven successful management methods without analysing the environment to then evolve these methods to consider the environment they were about to enter.
However, after they entered the market, they did consider change to their Management Methods including their open communication with participation method, Piece-work method and their substantial bonus systems with a guaranteed employment method. Although it took some time to realise that their management system required drastic changes, these key management methods clearly didn’t apply to a unknown workforce that where so deeply represented by a strong “European Union” that has a focus on the protection against the downside of Globalisation for large organisation attempting to enter such a market. UnfortunatelyLE initially missed the opportunity to adapt these management methods to Task Environment within an evaluated Broad Environment, and as a result substantial damage was already done to their competitive advantage at that time.
The critical step of gathering the information for evaluation to ensure control of such factors was unfortunately overlooked. The interrelation of the external environment in this case, with each of the stages of the process for strategic management was a critical area that LE failed to address and manage at the time, and as a result, they entered the foreign market without Environmental Determinism (Harrison & St. John 2014)
Considering the components of SMP and how they are interrelated, it seems clear to me that evaluation is the common binding element, Strengthening the theory that the Strategic Management Process must be adaptable and can never become ridged due to the components within, that require constant evaluation and control.
