The Importance of Strategic Thinking

Strategic planning, as well as setting the vision without the planning, shares an important purpose. It is to get managerial workers throughout the organization thinking strategically and wondering about how the firm adapts to its environment and how it will cope with its future. One of the central challenges of modern organizations is for leaders at all levels of the firm to think strategically including seeing the overall picture as they go about their work.

Strategic thinking heavily emphasizes long-term thinking. A business leader might want to make major capital expenditures that will have a payoff in the long run but reduce short-term earnings. Long-term strategies can be difficult to implement when investors areeager for short-term results. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc., has sometimes frustrated Wall Street investors because he pushes for a long-term strategic perspective. At one point a few years ago, he ended the company's practice of reporting sales numbers for individual units, saying that a 90-day performance is not a good proxy for the strength of a product line.

A strategically minded worker at any level would think, "How does what I am doing right now support corporate strategy?" The customer care center worker at Hewlett Packard Enterprises might think, "Each time I help a customer solve a problem I am contributing to the strategy of having the highest quality products in all the markets we serve."

An example of high-level strategic thinking is the company leadership at Google saying it will continue "pursuing moon shots." The phrases refer to the idea that as part of its strategy, the company will continue to pursue improbable projects that will require enormous amounts of cash and great leaps of faith. Among these moon shots are self-driving cars, antiaging drugs, and computerized glucose-sensing contact lenses for diabetics.

Based on the information regardingThe Importance of Strategic Thinking,we learn that strategic thinking is essential for a leader at all levels of the organization.

A major part of being a strategic leader is to think strategically. Entrapped by the necessities of the small tasks facing us daily, it is easy to "think little" instead of "think big" as required to be a strategic thinker. A "little thinker" might attend a leadership seminar and spend five minutes demanding a $10.00 rebate because that person was served ill-prepared food at lunch. A "big thinker" might reflect on the same poorly prepared meal as a lesson in the importance of employees' taking care of small details to ensure customer satisfaction. As a leader, give an example of how you capitalize or did not capitalize- on the opportunity to think strategically in any circumstance.

Here is an example follows:

My friend and I visited a large shopping mall on Saturday morning. We noticed a large number of vehicles, both autos and small trucks, circling around within a block of the mall entrance. The drivers were obviously looking for a parking spot close enough so they could avoid walking the block, or so, necessary if they parked farther from the entrance.

My friend is a fitness nut, so he said the parking space chasers could do themselves a favor by parking a long distance from the mall entrance. In this way they could get a little physical exercise. A strategic flash went through my mind. If I, or perhaps the First Lady, could launch a national campaign for parking a distance away from mall entrances, we could make some headway on two of the major problems facing our society. First, physical inactivity is becoming almost as big a killer as smoking or alcohol abuse. Second, think of all the gas people are wasting. On a national scale, think of all the gas we would save if people would stop circling around looking for spaces. Besides, those little extra blocks of gas consumption add up. My strategic brainstorm could lead to more fitness and less energy consumption in our country.