Factors Affecting and Theories Influencing Strategic Management

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Abstract
Every business regardless of their size has to plan ahead of its time. Strategic management is a crucial aspect in planning and assists firms to come up with highly refined plans to venture into new markets, maintain their market or develop and introduce new or redesigned products among other approaches. These strategic approaches are bound to evolve over time, regardless of the inputs from the company. This paper addresses the aspects within the business environment that tend to affect the evolution of the strategic management approaches. To help with the understanding of the concepts, the process of strategic management is elaborated upon. The paper dwells deep on some of the theories that help explain industry influences on the strategic management approaches such as PESTEL and the Porter's forces along with the internal influential factors. Conclusively, every business is set to have their strategic management affected by these changes and it is recommended, that they embrace the changes as they are ways of stimulating growth.
Introduction
Strategic management is one of the skills that are crucial in business management. It is a conscious process that involves planning, monitoring assessment and analysis. At the heart of strategic management are the goals and the objectives that the firm in question has set up, the resources and the time frame. It is a process that can be lightly defined as an art and a science that involves formulating, implementation and the evaluation of the cross functional decisions, which can enable the organization in question to achieve its goals and objectives. An in-depth evaluation of the process reveals that it integrates some of the core process in business management, such as marketing, accounting, finance, development, production, information technology and operations. All of these processes have to be intertwined and manage to an extent where they lead to success of the strategies and there after the goals and objectives in the strategic plans. The term strategic management is also used in synonymous manner with the term strategic planning. The latter is more common in the business world and vocabulary, while the former is more common in the academia realms (Strategicmanagementinsight.com, 2014).
As such, it is common to find that the term strategic management may be used to refer to the aspect of formulation, implementation and the evaluation. On the other hand the term strategic planning may commonly be used to refer to the aspects of strategy formulation alone. The bottom line for strategic management is to create opportunities that the business model can rely on in the future. This implies long range planning with a good twist optimizing today's trends for tomorrow. The aspects of strategic planning are quite old considering that concept gain traction in the 1950s and later became popular in the 60s and the 70s. At the time it was taken that this was a solution that fit all the financial and planning problems. However, strategic planning was put aside in the 80s, during the economic boom of the time (Strategicmanagementinsight.com, 2014). This was due to the fact that the models did not yield as much returns as was the expectation. Ove...