Essay on Strategic Management: Ikea Case Study

IKEA is a world famous furnishing company known for selling Scandinavian-style furniture and other home-based goods. The company has over 230 stores, with operations carried out in over 42 countries with well over 70 000 employees. The stores themselves can occupy 410 million shoppers per year. It is a Swedish based company built on the idea of offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products such low prices, that a majority of people will be able to afford them. The IKEA group is currently solely owned by the INGKA Foundation through a holding company, unlisted on any stock exchange.

Planning is the foundation of all the functions of management upon which the other three areas should be built. During planning, management must evaluate the company’s current situation and then developing strategies to achieve these goals, this is called strategic planning.

Strategic management is the process where leaders establish an organization’s long-term direction, set the specific performance objectives, develop strategies to achieve these objectives in the light of all external and internal changes, and undertake effective strategies to manage these changes and execute action plans.

Pearce and Robinson describe strategic management as the art of making complex, long-term, future-oriented decisions and taking actions that result in the formulation and implementation of plans designed to achieve a company's objectives. The process focuses on the belief that a firm's mission can be best be achieved through a systematic and comprehensive assessment of both its internal capabilities and its external environment (Pearce & Robinson, 2005). In the article Strategic Management, the strategic management process is described as the implementation of the company's strategy by executive management considering its resources, circumstances, and environment to position the organization to complete is mission in a

Strategic Planning is one of the most fundamental factors in the success of an organization. This research project will discuss the importance of strategic planning as well as the different components of strategic planning. Many organizations fail to accomplish their goals and tasks due to the lacking of strategic planning. In order for their businesses to be successful, organizations need to be well informed about how the strategic planning process works.

He distinguished planning and strategy as being very clear that those two terms are different, through his whole book he was explaining how planning is coming before making a strategy and how planning is more important the strategy itself. One of his key point in the book was that the company should more invest on the insight of the company then on the figures, as he believes that there is no high output and profit if the employees are not satisfied. By reading his book, I have come to a conclusion that every step has to be planned so the company gets to their

Strategic management is a blend of strategy formulation and strategy implementation and together, they provide an overall direction of the organization. It is the highest level of managerial activity, usually performed by an organization’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the leadership team.

Strategic management is the application of the basic planning process at the highest levels of the company. Top management sets goals for the performance of the company carefully formulating, implementing and evaluating plans and strategies. It involves specifying the organization’s mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources

Strategic Management, what is this? It is that set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the long-run performance of a corporation. It includes environmental scanning, strategy formulation and implementation, and evolution and control. The study of Strategic Management helps us to monitoring and evaluating the opportunities and threats of a company’s strengths and weaknesses.

By operating the business in Thailand (foreign market), IKEA adopt the strategy called “Think Global, Act Local” in the sense that IKEA maintains, applies and upholds their core values and cultures in their practices, while learning to adapt and understand the Thai culture and the Thai market in terms of needs, desires and wants of Thai people in general in order to survive and succeed.

Strategic management is vital to business and ensuring profitability. “Businesses see survival, improvement and success” as objectives (Pickton & Wright, 1998, p.103). Successful strategies are created through analysis of the business industry environment, and involves trade-off’s between operational effectiveness, benchmarks, and cost minimisation (Abdolvan & Asadollahi, 2012; Agarwal, Grassi & Pahl, 2012; Stonehouse & Showdon, 2007). Gary Hemmel comments, in Porter (2010, p.1), that, “Strategy is, above all

IKEA is a well-known global brand with hundreds of stores across the world. In order to improve performance, it must assess its external and competitive environment which will reveal the key opportunities to analyze there advantages and threats. IKEA responds to both internal and external issues in a proactive and dynamic manner by using its strengths and reducing its weaknesses. This helps IKEA to retain its strong identity in market. IKEA’s passion combines design, low prices, economical use of resources, and responsibility for people and the environment. IKEA believes that there is no compromise between doing good business and being a good business. It aims to go beyond

This school sees strategy formation as a visionary process and is fell under the descriptive school of strategic management. The chief architect of the strategy is the CEO of a company. This school took formal leadership seriously and CEO is responsible for strategy formulation. It stressed on mental state and processes such as instinctive knowledge, belief, wisdom, experience and insight of a single leader. The leader should be visionary in formulating strategy. The entrepreneurial school promotes strategy as a process which has a clear image and sense of direction which can be termed as a vision. Entrepreneurial strategy often occurs in startup companies and organizations in trouble and needing a

Organizational planning is a fine art; it is the most intricate phase of an organization’s start-up and implementation process and the most important. One can have a vision for a business; however without proper planning it will not reach its full potential. This concept paper will discuss the necessity of proper strategic planning for an organization, by examining three key components of planning; organizing, leading and controlling. Organizational planning starts with a vision, the leader must create a mental picture of the final product; this is followed by defining the mission of the organization and the goals of the organization. Once these are established the executive management team begins strategic planning. “Strategic

As we all know, strategy and structure is one of the most fundamental and significant part of an organization. Strategy and structure is come up by planning process during processes of management in organization, therefore, it is not possible to ignore how well an organization in determining its mission and goal, planning appropriate strategies and structures of organization and implementing these strategies.