In this brilliantly conceived practical book for managers, Dan Thomas shows how managers can take advantage of core management processes - what he terms management's Five Freedoms - that make the most difference between success and failure. Dan Thomas, who has been an entrepreneur, educator, consultant and manager, has devoted over twenty years to studying strategy, structure and systems of successful companies. He explains how managers can exercise their five freedoms to chose the right business, create the right strategy, implement the right systems, design the right organization structure, and get the right people.

He further argues how even in businesses with a lower potential for success developing the right strategy can produce superior results. Companies such as Wal-Mart, in the otherwise faltering retail industry and Southwest Airlines, in an ailing airline retail industry are cases in point.

Key Points on Strategic Management in this Book

The author defines strategy as that set of dynamic integrated decisions, which you must make in order to position your business in its complex business environment.

The following is a summary of thoughts on strategic management in this book: -

• The business strategy is made up of a set of decisions, with the purpose to position the business in its environment to meet the potentially conflicting needs of its stakeholders.

• The decisions comprise an integrated set. The change of one decision will affect others. As these are also dynamic and complex the strategy has to be changing rapidly. The strategy is never static it is always emerging.

• The dynamics and complexities can be known by predicting the future of the business through structural analysis.

• Based on structural analysis, we can know whether the current strategy would be successful or if there is a strategic drift and we need to choose an alternative strategy based on emerging needs.

• The emerging strategy must make only minimum changes that fix the weakness and play to the strengths of the current strategy.

• The emerging strategy should depend upon the boundary objectives of the company. Boundary objectives are the shareholder's definition of wealth. Within these constraints, the limits within which the company should work, the most appropriate specific objectives of developing a strategy are: -

  • It should meet the minimum needs of the stakeholders, i.e. convert the intended strategy to the realized strategy.

  • It should with the characteristics of the situation, i.e. obtain the strategic fit based on the environment.

  • It should have certainty, i.e. have the ability to use the cultural web of the organization to make the difficult strategic change happen with certainty.

* Contributed by -
Amaresh Mishra,
PGP 2003-2005,
XIM Bhubaneswar.