(Exam questions) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

(Exam questions) - Essay Example "When the environment audit is undertaken, the objective is to develop a finite list of opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses. Here the word finite list is emphasized because the job of the manager is not to make an exhaustive list of all the factors that may affect the organization. But focus should be on key environmental variables that could influence business"1. The importance of the environmental analysis is mostly realized by organizations but the depth of the analysis is often compromised. For example in Toyota Corporation, there is a management concept "to go to the roots". The meaning of this concept is that, when we are collecting information for analysis, the information should be collected from the source or in other words from the origin. When an external environmental analysis is done with information collected from the sources and decisions are made based on such in-depth data, the applicability and durability of strategic plans are considerably increased. The information from the external environment should be used to tune up the internal environment to meet the challenges and make good of the opportunities. When an organization needs to possess a competitive advantage its focus should be internalized rather externalized. The ability of a business concern to focus on its strengths and potential areas of improvement will lead to formulation of workable plans. Hence, the conflict between where we are and where we want to go does not arise. Wastage of time and money on formulating strategies which have to be later sacrificed to carry out day to day operations can be avoided. Many a times in a business organization, managers are faced with the challenge to modify the day to day operations to achieve the long term strategic goals and vice versa. This may be due to the gaps between the aspirations and actual business environment. The organization may aspire to achieve the mission and vision, but the ground reality faced by the company may create hurdles in the path. In an organization, long term strategic plans are useful to tune up the operations to achieve future objectives. But, it is often hard to follow the preplanned course of actions. This may be due to various reasons and mangers are often at the cross roads. Assigning priorities and making decisions becomes a challenge for the business managers when they have to decide the sacrifices that have to be made to get along in business. When we argue that often operational priorities derail strategic plans, it denotes that the culture in an organization is not oriented towards the strategic plans made. Th e external environment is ever dynamic and the strategy formulated should be flexible to accommodate the changes. When the strategists bring this concept into the strategy formulation right from the nascent stage then the situation of trade off of strategies can be avoided. When a person wants to achieve something in future the attitude, personality, values and other psychographic factors should be matching with what he/she wants to achieve. In an organization there are so many people working who have different kinds of needs. When different people work together to contribute towards the success of the organization, then the pattern in dealing with problems and the behavior of the employees should be assessed. This pattern of behavior is often called as the