In 1985, Ellen-Earle Chaffee summarized what she thought were the main elements of strategic management theory by the 1970s:[7] • Strategic management involves adapting the organization to its business environment. • Strategic management is fluid and complex. Change creates novel combinations of circumstances requiring unstructured non-repetitive responses. • Strategic management affects the entire organization by providing direction. • Strategic management involves both strategy formation (she called it content) and also strategy implementation (she called it process). • Strategic management is partially planned and partially unplanned. • Strategic management is done at several levels: overall corporate strategy, and individual business strategies. • Strategic management involves both conceptual and analytical thought processes. The marketing revolution The 1970s also saw the rise of the marketing oriented firm. From the beginnings of capitalism it was assumed that the key requirement of business success was a product of high technical quality. If you produced a product that worked well and was durable, it was assumed you would have no difficulty selling them at a profit. This was called the production orientation and it was generally true that good products could be sold without effort, encapsulated in the saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." This was largely due to the growing numbers of affluent and middle class people that capitalism had created. But after the untapped demand caused by the second world war was saturated in the 1950s it became obvious that products were not selling as easily as they had been. The answer was to concentrate on selling. The 1950s and 1960s is known as the sales era and the guiding philosophy of business of the time is today called the sales orientation. In the early 1970s Theodore Levitt and others at Harvard argued that the sales orientation had things backward. They claimed that instead of producing products then trying to sell them to the customer, businesses should start with the customer, find out what they wanted, and then produce it for them. The customer became the driving force behind all strategic business decisions. This marketing orientation, in the decades since its introduction, has been reformulated and repackaged under numerous names including customer orientation, marketing philosophy, customer intimacy, customer focus, customer driven, and market focused. In 1988, Henry Mintzberg looked at the changing world around him and decided it was time to reexamine how strategic management was done.[60][61] He examined the strategic process and concluded it was much more fluid and unpredictable than people had thought. Because of this, he could not point to one process that could be called strategic planning. Instead Mintzberg concludes that there are five types of strategies: • Strategy as plan - a direction, guide, course of action - intention rather than actual (责任编辑：BUG) |
