CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES OF SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY

Abstract

A successful strategy is a well-defined long-term strategy, which leads the company to achieve its desired goals and along with it, predicting the expected slow changes in the environment and the opportunities created there. It also gives a chance to find a cost advantage. However, developing and implementing such a strategy in today's rapidly changing environment is associated with many challenges. Among them, one of the most important is the right choice of operational strategy and the compatibility of this strategy with the company's mission. However, if the mission is to tell the public about the company, what makes it similar to its competitors, the main challenge of the operations strategy is to distinguish the given company from competitors with the same mission. All operations, regardless of how correctly they are planned and controlled, always contain a certain potential for development, which does not require a radical change in the budget. It is the realization of such, seemingly insignificant, but numerous opportunities, in the final analysis, ensures the continuous development of the company's operational processes and systems, manufactured products and rendered services. Two important things happen at this time. The first is that all directions of the operational strategy, be it customer relationship management, measures to increase the company's productivity, or the design of innovations, are interrelated and, one might say, interdependent processes; Second, and more importantly, a key management challenge has shifted the planning of operational processes from a position of control to development. Unfortunately, in most national companies, there is no clear development strategy, let alone an operational strategy. And where a strategic development plan seems to exist, very little attention is paid to the challenges of the company's core operating function and to operational development in general. In order to find out what attention should be paid to operational development, we more than 100 managers of small and medium businesses were interviewed in Kutaisi and its surroundings. Analyzing the obtained results gave us the following picture: 36% of respondents have not even heard of a strategic development plan and, naturally, have no idea what operational strategy and operational development should mean; and of those who confirm that they are well aware of the importance of a strategic development plan, almost half (46% to be more precise) have not heard of such a need for the operational strategy of the main creator of such a plan. That is, in fact, 67% of the respondents have no idea even about the essence of operational strategy. It is even more problematic that 18% of the total number of respondents perceived "operative development" as a medical term. The Japanese call continuous development "Kaizen". It can be safely said that today "Kaizen" also represents a culture of successful company development. Although it refers to development in personal life, family and public activities, but when it comes to the company, "Kaizen" means continuous development with managers and hired staff. Shifting the emphasis to situational strategy indicates that not infrequently changes are so sudden that they overwhelm you, and focusing only on a pre-planned strategy does not guarantee success. Today, in fact, two main challenges of strategy formation face each other: focusing on anticipated changes and focusing on changes revealed over time. In our opinion, if today the strategy focused on expected changes, that is, pre-planned, still works well, tomorrow it can be said for sure that the balance will be tilted in favor of focusing on the changes revealed in the process of strategy implementation.