According to Porter's Generic Strategies model, there are three basic strategic options available to organizations for gaining competitive advantage. These are: Cost Leadership, Differentiation and Focus.
It begins by examining three models of planning: comprehensive rationalism, mixed scanning, and incrementalism. Although none of these is likely to be desirable (or indeed feasible) in its pure form, each throws light on different ways of approaching planning. In practice these models are inevitably combined.
The Strategic Approaches include collaboration and partnership, technology, policy change and development, capacity building, and systemic change and integration.
The four approaches to strategic management are Classical, Evolutionary, Systemic and Processual, each of which is described in detail below.
4 levels of strategy are;
- Corporate level strategy.
- Business level strategy.
- Functional level strategy.
- Operational level strategy.
For better clarification of the term strategy, we should distinguish among three forms of strategy: general strategy, corporate strategy, and competitive strategy. The general strategy is such a strategy as to how a given objective will be accomplished.
In 1987, the Canadian management scientist Henry Mintzberg distinguished five visions for strategy for organisations. He calls them the 5 P's of Strategy. They stand for Plan, Pattern, Position, Perspective and Ploy.
'The strategy wheel model' includes five types of organization strategy: shared, hidden, false, learning and realized.
Strategic management is the process and approach of specifying an organization's objectives, developing policies, programmes, paradigms and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources so as to implement the policies, programmes, paradigms and plans.
Fundamentally, there are four different approaches to do formal strategic planning.
There are two approaches to strategic planning: prescriptive and emergent approaches. Both have advantages and are thus relevant to organisations depending on the business environment of a given organisation. In practice, there is no such a thing as a pure prescriptive or pure emergent approach.