2. What Is the Meaning of Strategic
Direction?
• Running a business without an eye toward
strategic direction is liking setting out on a
road trip to an unfamiliar place without a map
or a navigation app. You may eventually reach
your destination, but the journey will be
chaotic, and you'll most likely waste more
effort than necessary. Developing a solid
strategy that outlines your company direction
will help you to increase profitability while
making your day-to-day work less stressful.
3. How to Set a Strategic Direction
• The importance of strategic direction lies in its
capacity to orient your company's overall
purpose. Consider your vision, or your big-
picture reason for wanting to be in business.
This can be as ethereal as wanting to make the
world a better place or as practical as wanting
to earn as much money as possible while
making the least possible effort. Your vision
should embody the "why" behind your
venture
4. • Next, consider your company's mission, or the
tangible way you will make your vision into a
reality. Your mission statement will likely include
some specifics about your products and services.
For example, an auto mechanic might articulate a
mission to keep its customers' cars safe and
mechanically sound, and a fair-trade importer
might adopt a mission to improve the quality of
life for indigenous artisans by paying fair prices
for their offerings. Your mission is the "what" to
your vision's "why."
5. The role of strategic direction in
organization
• The primary responsibility of top management is to
determine an organization’s goals, strategy, and design,
therein adapting the organization to a changing
environment.
• Direction setting begins with an assessment of
opportunities and threats in the environment and an
evaluation of internal strengths and weaknesses.
• Then the company can determine its mission, goals and
strategies. Organizational design reflects the way goals and
strategies are implemented. This is the role of organization
theory.
• Consider how organization design is affected by the choice
of goals and strategy
6. • New goals and strategy are often selected
based upon environmental needs, and then
top management attempts to redesign the
organization to achieve those ends.
Performance measurements feed back into
the internal environment, so that past
performance of the organization is assessed
by top management in setting new goals and
strategies for the future
7. Organizational Purpose
• Purpose may be referred to as the overall goal
or mission. Different parts of the organization
establish their own goals to help the
organization achieve its overall purpose.
Purpose refers to why you do what you do,
not what you do or how you do it but why you
do it. Purpose has been shown to positively
impact employee engagement and
commitment to an organization thereby
impacting organizational effectivenes
8. • Mission
The official overall goal for an organization is its
mission. The mission describes the organization's
vision, its shared values and aspirations, and its reason
for existence.
• Operative Goals
Operative goals refer to the ends sought through
operating procedures and describe specific measurable
outcomes in the short run. These goals concern overall
performance, boundary spanning, and maintenance,
adaptation, and production
