Strategic management: concept, process, decisions

Strategy is the pattern of decisions that sets an organisation's long-term direction: where to compete, how to win, and what capabilities to build. Strategic management is the process of making and carrying out those decisions: analysing the environment and the organisation, formulating strategy, implementing it, and evaluating results. Worked example: a regional coaching institute deciding whether to go online nationally is a strategic decision — it is long-term, resource-heavy, hard to reverse and shapes every other decision — unlike the operational decision of which textbook to use this term. The difference is scope, time horizon, reversibility and resource commitment, and exam questions test exactly that distinction.