The Art of Strategic Management.

Welcome to our lectures and seminars on ´Strategic Management´. We’ll start talking about the way to manage a company on the long term. Is this possible over a period of four or more years? Although weather couldn´t be precisely forecasted with the help of supercomputers for more than two weeks. Well, does it make any sense at all ? Which tools may be of any interest to managers and of course to you? Is this strategy business an important trend? Maybe a downtrend? Is it important for your personal career? Are there any recipes for success? Is strategic management only a matter of top management´s interest? Or should everyone in a company understand it?

My short CV: My name is Hartwig Max Maly. Maly is my family name. It´s of polish origin and means little. Hartwig is a very old german name. Long ago, it was someone carrying a javelin. And it´s my first name. For reasons of simplicity call me Max. I was born in 1952. I studied chemistry and physics and made my PhD on ´Quantum Mechanical Calcuations of Molecular Vibrations` in 1984. In this area strategy is of no interest. Physicists aren´t quite sure whether time exists at all. Thereafter I worked for a big international pharmaceutical company in different management functions. Main focus on IT, strategy, research and consulting. Since 2001 I work for my own as management trainer and career coach.

General remarks: To manage (lat. manus agere = to take something by hand), means taking and changing a company according to the company´s objectives. Objectives are your targets as a manager of your company. The end of your company´s journey. That doesn´t sound very easy? And of course it isn´t. Managing a company e.g. with 1.000 employees to achieve a target, is a challenging job. 1.000 different ideas – or more – to live and work and 1.000 different options for you as a manager to motivate or frustrate your employees.

If you intend to do your business strategically, it either means to plan and to manage over a longer period of time, at least three years, or to plan and manage significant changes/ innovations like the bringing of products like iPhone or iPad onto the market. Every possible way approaching a target is called a strategy. Of course, there are a lot of different ways respectively strategies. But we are only interested in one of them, called the dominating strategy. It´s not always the shortest way. Because there are a lot of obstacles in our road map affecting our strategy. Strong competitors, powerful trends, innovations, unpredictable events like ´Taleb´s black swans´. A VUCAenvironment. It´s of course not possible to forecast anything over a longer period of,time, for instance of more than some weeks in detail. Although we know this, we as Managers, trainers or consultants wish to develop and use strategy-tools to succeed with our company in a more or less challenging market.

You will learn to understand basic concepts in the area of strategy and use strategy tools to solve contemporary company´s problems. And if you are interested in, advanced strategies for dedicated corporate processes like e.g. research, development, operations, Marketing.

I look forward to Meeting you in our Seminars. Kind regards    Dr. Hartwig Maly

logo