Companies have always found it hard to balance pressing operational Essay

Companies have always found it hard to balance pressing operational concerns with long-term strategic priorities,DISCUSS - Essay Example This may be due to various reasons and mangers are often at the cross roads. Assigning priorities and making decisions becomes a challenge for the business managers when they have to decide what are the sacrifices that have to be made to get along in business. Hence, this essay focuses on the analysis of what causes the companies to compromise on their strategic plans. When a company formulates the strategy, first an internal and external environmental analysis has to be carried out. When we are planning for the future first the organization should have awareness about the internal and external environmental factors that can impact the organization. â€Å"When the environment audit is undertaken, the objective is to develop a finite list of opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses. Here the word finite list is emphasized because the job of the manager is t not make an exhaustive list of all the factors that may affect the organization. But focus should be on key environmental variables that could influence business†1. The importance of the environmental analysis is mostly realized by organizations but the depth of the analysis is often compromised. For example in Toyota corporation, there is a management concept â€Å"to go to the roots†. The meaning of this concept is that, when we are collecting information for analysis, th e information should be collected from the source or in other words from the origin. When an external environmental analysis is done with information collected from the sources and decisions are made based on such in-depth data, the applicability and durability of strategic plans are considerably increased. The information from the external environment should be used to tune up the internal environment to meet the challenges and make good of the opportunities. When an organization needs to possess a competitive advantage its focus should be internalized rather externalized. The ability of a business concern to focus on its