Strategic management involves understanding the strategic position of an organisation, strategic choices for the future and managing strategy in action. Strategic management involves exploring and management of an organizational corporate strategy. It also involves modeling and analysing the overall corporate strategy of the system to include the strategic position of the organisation, strategic choices by the organisation and strategy in action within and around the organisation may be represented as in Figure. 1. Having explained the term “strategy” in some details, how then can we explain or describe strategic management?. Strategic management is the process and approach of specifying an organization’s objectives, developing policies, programmes, paradigms and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources so as to implement the policies, programmes, paradigms and plans. In other words, strategic management can be seen as management of combined components of the three stages of the strategy process; that is, strategy development, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation (some management philosophers refer to the first stage as strategy formulation but I prefer to call it strategy development because it is policy that is formulated while strategy is usually developed). involves exploring and management of an organizational corporate strategy. It also involves Figure 3. Barney’s (1991) Conceptual Model (Newbert, 2007) Competitive advantage is perhaps the most widely used term in strategic management, yet it remains poorly defined and operationalized (Ma, 2000). Ma (2000) makes three observations regarding competitive advantage and conceptually explores the various patterns of relationship between competitive advantage and firm performance, namely: (i) competitive advantage does not equate to superior performance; (ii) competitive advantage is a relational term; and (iii) competitive advantage is context-specific. In addition, Ma (2000) further examines three patterns of relationship between competitive advantage and firm performance, namely: (i) competitive advantage leading to superior performance; (ii) competitive advantage without superior performance; and (iii) superior performance without competitive advantage. The ultimate purpose of Ma’s (2000) article is to help generate a healthy debate among strategy scholars on the usefulness of the competitive advantage construct for our theory building and testing. Ma (1999b) has also argued that Figure 4. Anatomy of Competitive Advantage Competitive advantage is the basis for superior performance. Understanding t natomy of competitive advantage is of paramount importance to general managers wh« year the ultimate responsibility for a firm’s long term survival and success. Ma (1999 idvances an integrative framework called SELECT to help general managers systematica xamine the various facets of the anatomy of competitive advantage: its substance xpression, locale, effect, cause, and time-span. It has been reasoned that by analyzing t auses of competitive advantage helps a firm create and gain advantage. Studying t al ly ne ne ubstance, expression, locale, and effect of competitive advantage allows the firm to bette itilize the advantage. Examining the time span of competitive advantage enables the firm te Generic sources of competitive advantage include ownership of assets or position; access to distribution and supply; as well as proficiency — knowledge, competence, and capability - in business operations. It has also been further argued that in order to achieve and sustain competitive advantage, a firm needs to creatively and proactively exploit the three generic sources, preempt rivals attempt at these sources, and/or pursue any combination of proactive and preemptive effort. This submission advances an integrative framework that helps management practitioners systematically analyze the nature and cause of competitive advantage.
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