Imagine that you are the CEO of Biggies, a chain of family-style restaurants. You are interested in implementing the strategic management process in your restaurants. Summarize the strategic management process and explain how you would execute each of the steps and the feedback loop of the strategic management process in your restaurant chain.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The strategic-management process involves five steps:

1. Establish the mission, vision, and values statements.
2. Assess the current reality.
3. Formulate the grand strategy.
4. Implement the strategy.
5. Maintain strategic control.

The feedback loop comes out of strategic control. Through control, managers monitor progress and take corrective action early and rapidly when things go awry, sometimes returning to earlier steps to rethink policies, redo budgets, or revise personnel arrangements.
Following are suggested answers for implementing the strategic-management process at Biggies.

1. Establish the mission, vision, and values statements. Biggies' mission statement might be "To provide an affordable meal for the American family, with quality food and friendly service." Its vision statement might read, "Biggies will expand beyond the East Coast to become a national brand known for its commitment to the local community and to its atmosphere of family friendliness. Our restaurants will be a place where parents can count on healthy and tasty meals not only for themselves, but also for their children." The values statement might read, "Biggies is committed to fair trade and equity, to ensuring that suppliers are paid a reasonable price for their goods, and to offering jobs first and foremost to the people who live in the towns where our restaurants are located."

2. Assess the current reality. To assess the current reality, as the CEO of Biggies you will conduct competitive intelligence, keeping track of your competitors' actions (for example, the new menu items they are offering) to make sure you are not caught unaware. You may decide to conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) in your environment, and you will plan for your business's long-term potential by forecasting with trend analysis and planning for contingencies. You will benchmark your competitors to assess their best practices and perhaps use Porter's model for industry analysis, examining the threats of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers, the threats of substitute products or services, and rivalry among competitors.

3. Formulate the grand strategy. As the CEO, you will decide whether to pursue a growth, stability, or defensive strategy. You will also decide on a key competitive strategy: cost-leadership, differentiation, cost-focus, or focused-differentiation. You will decide whether to focus on a single product or to diversify; and you may use the BCG matrix to determine whether each restaurant in your chain is a star, question mark, cash cow, or dog. You likely will not use a blue ocean strategy because there are many chain restaurants and it would be almost impossible to find a market space that makes all competitors irrelevant.

4. Implement the strategy. To implement the strategies you've chosen, you will overcome roadblocks in the organization's structure and culture, keeping an eye on personnel who may feel that the plans threaten their influence or livelihood. You will win over these employees by actively selling your plans to them and making them feel like an important part of the company's success.

5. Maintain strategic control. To maintain strategic control, you will engage people, keep it simple, stay focused, and keep moving. You'll focus on the three core business processes: people, strategy, and operations.