Business Policy Strategic Management Essay

Strategic Management

Please discuss, in detail, what is meant by a hierarchy of strategy?

In any organization there must be a hierarchy of strategy when any strategy is designed on an organizational level because to implement such a strategy it will have to be coordinated on many levels. For example, the CEO or the Board of Directors may wish to push an organization in a new direction with a high level strategic plan. They could see an opportunity in the market and wish to better position to take advantage of the opportunity that they have identified. However, to move towards such an opportunity it takes effort from the entire organization and they must move in unison. Therefore on lower levels of the organizational hierarchy there will have to be tactical decisions made about how to best organize daily operations to move towards the organizational strategies that have been implemented on a higher level.

The most efficiently run organizations will be able to implement strategies quickly and in a coordinated fashion. This often involves that most levels of the organization are participants in the strategy development. If organizational members are participants in strategy development then they are more likely to understand and support its implementation; it creates a sense of organizational buy-in from the employees. Even if it is not practical to involve everyone in strategy decisions because the organization is too large for example, the strategy still must be communicated to the employees in an effective way so that the organization can make changes as a whole. This is often the case because a majority of organizations implement strategies in a top down approach rather than a bottom up one. One…