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Strategy
When an organization has a long-term purpose, articulated in clear goals and
objectives, and these goals and objectives can be rolled up into a coherent plan of
action, then we would say that the organization has a strategy. It has a good or

even great strategy when this plan also takes advantage of unique resources and
capabilities to exploit a big and growing external opportunity. Strategy then, is the
central, integrated, externally-oriented concept of how an organization will achieve
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its objectives. Strategic management is the body of knowledge that answers
questions about the development and implementation of good strategies.
Strategic management is important to all organizations because, when correctly
formulated and communicated, strategy provides leaders and employees with a clear
set of guidelines for their daily actions. This is why strategy is so critical to the
principles of management you are learning about. Simply put, strategy is about
making choices: What do I do today? What shouldn’t I be doing? What should my
organization be doing? What should it stop doing?
Synchronizing Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy
You know that leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategy are the inspiration for
important, valuable, and useful principles of management. Now you will want to
understand how they might relate to one another. In terms of principles of
management, you can think of leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategic
management as answering questions about “who,” “what,” and “how.” Leadership
helps you understand who helps lead the organization forward and what the critical
characteristics of good leadership might be. Entrepreneurial firms and entrepreneurs
in general are fanatical about identifying opportunities and solving problems—for
any organization, entrepreneurship answers big questions about “what” an
organization’s purpose might be. Finally, strategic management aims to make sure
that the right choices are made—specifically, that a good strategy is in place—to
exploit those big opportunities.
One way to see how leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategy come together
for an organization—and for you—is through a recent (disguised) job posting from
Craigslist. Look at the ideal candidate characteristics identified in the Help Wanted
ad—you don’t have to look very closely to see that if you happen to be a recent
business undergrad, then the organization depicted in the ad is looking for you. The
posting identifies a number of areas of functional expertise for the target candidate.
You can imagine that this new position is pretty critical for the success of the
business. For that reason, we hope you are not surprised to see that, beyond
functional expertise, this business seeks someone with leadership, entrepreneurial,
and strategic orientation and skills. Now you have a better idea of what those key
principles of management involve.
Help Wanted—Chief of Staff
We’re hiring a chief of staff to bring some order to the mayhem of our firm’s
growth. You will touch everything at the company, from finance to sales, marketing
to operations, recruiting to human resources, accounting to investor relations. You
will report directly to the CEO.

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