10 Benefits of Strategic Decision Making

What is Strategic Decision Making?

Strategic decision-making is the process of comprehending the interaction of decisions and their impact on an organization to gain an advantage. Its true power lies in combining the right decision with the right time.

To remain competitive, organizations must make decisions that minimize long-term risks and maximize short-term results. Strategic decision-making combines the five decision-making steps with the concepts of threat, opportunity, risk, and countervailing factors to help your company grow. 

10 Benefits of Strategic Management

In addition to maintaining a progressive approach, some of the benefits of strategic management are as follows:

• Helps Achieve Goals

Irrespective of the industry and size, every company has myriad goals to achieve. They can aim for international competitiveness, brand awareness, better customer service, or building industry leadership. Strategic management accelerates your progress towards successfully achieving any of these goals.

• Liquidity Monitoring

One of the key benefits of strategic decision-making is that it enables organizations to ensure that their cash flow coordinates with their long-term goals. Tracking liquidity reports or cash flow systems helps keep a check. 

• Better Revenue Generation

Strategic management allows the senior management to introduce essential changes in the existing operating processes. Often considering competitors' strategies for inspiration helps companies develop more profitable ideas and tweak their processes to outperform them.

Innovative ideas, when implemented strategically, facilitate long-term benefits in terms of revenue. It lures more investors and helps maintain healthy relationships with the existing ones.

• Prevents Legal Risks

The strategic management process improves employee-related and other partner stakeholder-related policies. It helps avoid conflicts based on interest policies for board members and other partners. Consulting an attorney, insurance provider, and other professionals often assists in maintaining legal compliance and avoiding the risk of penalties associated with the non-fulfillment of legal obligations.

• Supports Understanding and Buy-In

With the intervention of the board and staff in strategic decision-making, a better understanding of the direction is developed. It explains why a direction is chosen and its associated benefits. 

• Enables Progress Measurement

Strategic management forces a company to set clear objectives and measure success. Setting the measures of success entails that the organization first determines the factors critical to its ongoing success. Next, the company forces the establishment of objectives. Finally, critical measures are presented before the board and senior management.

• Drives Business Growth

Strategic decision-making is a key tool to drive business growth. It helps figure out the best way of achieving a business objective, provided an organization has a decision-making process that involves a well-defined set of policies that must be adhered to by all. Using various data analytics and data discovery tools helps you make better decisions. Power BI visuals tool comes with several secured options for making better and smarter decisions.

• Allows Organizations to be Proactive

One of the most outshining benefits of strategic decision-making is that when these decisions translate into action, they improve your organization's efficiency. Deciding the course of your future actions sets the tone for the entire organization. A farsighted approach helps mitigate future risks.

• Awareness of External Threats

Planning your organization's progress without proper knowledge of potential threats puts rigorous efforts in vain. Strategic decision-making and management require you to be aware of the external threats in the very first step. Thus, it considerably reduces the chances of failure as you brace beforehand. 

• Improved Understanding of Competitor Strengths

Adopting strategic management ensures longer-term viability and success in the marketplace. It improves your understanding of a competitor's strengths and weaknesses and helps you craft your strategy accordingly. You have chances of performing better in the market when you produce a product or service that meets the user's needs in a way that the competitors cannot.

Disadvantages of Strategic Management 

In contrast to the benefits, the following demerits might also creep into strategic management:

• Unpreparedness for an unanticipated future:  Strategic management requires an organization to anticipate the future to develop plans. When the future does not unfold as anticipated, it can invalidate the adopted strategy. 
• Expensive option: Several organizations in the not-for-profit sector cannot afford to hire an external consultant for effective strategy development. Even for the companies that can afford it, it is important to ensure that the strategic management process implementation stays consistent with the organization's needs with appropriate controls to allow the cost/benefit discussions. 
• Impedes flexibility: Often, organizations take up excessively formal strategic management processes. The established processes lack innovation and creativity. They can stifle the organization's ability to strike innovative solutions, inhibiting the capacity to change and adapt.
• Long-term benefit vs. immediate results: Strategic management might not seem lucrative initially as it is designed to provide long-term benefits. For immediate crisis management, one has to opt for a different path. It is often recommended that companies address the immediate crises before allocating resources to strategic management. 

Strategic Management vs. Strategic Planning

Strategic management incorporates formulation, implementation, evaluation, and improvement of strategies stimulating the organization's long-term objectives while considering external and internal factors.

Contrastingly, strategic planning is all about the proposal and formulation of schemes that help attain a target. 

Conclusion

The benefits of strategic decision making are many, both from financial and non-financial aspects, but unfortunately, there are certain disadvantages too. Most of the disadvantages arise because of inappropriate application as opposed to inherent limitations. Adopt the best practices for strategic decision making and watch your business advance to unprecedented success.  

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