The notion given by the book was that, the organisation is like a 'body', which has got its internal and external environment. The features of environment and its relationship with 'body' give the 'strengths' and 'weaknesses' of organisation. The success of an organisation depends on how well it manages its strengths and can turn weakness into strengths. But the environment itself is changing. Thus strategic management deals with the managing and exploiting the environment forces and use them on the present status of organisation to the best of organisational future and thus achieving the cherished goal of the organization.

• The future of the organisation in 21st century brings lots of paradoxes and if one has to survive in future then he has to live with those paradoxes. The example of this ambiguity in strategic management is notion of centralization and decentralization of organisations, local and global organisations. The intended strategy has to accept the notion of these paradoxes and should make strategy, which can take care of any situation in its purview.

• The environment of business is changing fast and to cope with this situation organisation needs to empower its employees to think about the future of the company. This can be done by 'empowerment' and 'building high trust culture'. This unleashes the potential of each employee as the growth engine for the organisation. This can helps in strategic analysis in the strategic management model.

• The successful organisations bring their competitiveness in leadership of 'structural change' in the industry. Thus creating new rules of the game e.g. IBM brought in 'new model of workstation' this creating a revolution. This requires high degree of passion in the organisations to do things differently and differentiating largely in different things.

• The organization have to think of 'strategic management' to take advantage in the industry from 'out of its resource points' e.g. the software industry in India takes advantage of low manpower rates but this advantage is from its resource base thus could not last for long. But 'product development' cycle time reduction is true advantage for any organisation.

• The industries could not make much money due to constraints. As per 'Eli Goldratt' only one constraint is responsible to limit the profit of a company. Therefore the role of strategic manager is to apply 'theory of constraints' detect the constraint and mitigate its effect to increase the competitiveness and profit and future of company.

• The global market is full of potential but no one knows where the potential lies. Therefore, every company should narrow down its focus to complete globally. This will help in long term planning and getting the best out of uncertain future. Focus of the future organisations should be towards the niche segments they can serve and serve best.

• The strategy manager should make sure that organisational learning is always included in intended as well as realized strategy. As organization learning creates culture of experimentation and creates pockets of excellence. These pockets of excellence produce leaders for organisation, which take organisation into future. Best example given in class about TCS multimedia experimentation in past which helped the company in future. The organisation learning brings in incremental growth in organisation, which later help in transformation change.

• The strategy made should be flexible enough to take in account of human resource first. The organisation works well when people in organisation have a sense of purpose and shared vision with the company. The responsibility of business leaders is to develop this sense of purpose among the people of the organisation so that they can work for not only today but for a better tomorrow for the company.

* Contributed by -
Abhijit Misra,
PGP 2003-2005,
XIM Bhubaneswar.