Learning Journal Part 1: Theme 1

Question 1

In your own words, using reference quotes, describe the similarities and difference between business strategy and military strategy.

Answer:

Strategy is the process of analyzing the past and present environment to collect the information and predict the future. Johnson and Scholes (2011) as cited by (Riley, 2012) describe strategy as the long term direction of an organization to achieve goal utilizing organizational resources to meet the stakeholder and market expectations.

Many organization use strategy for example military organization use their military strategy to develop best defense and offence power than other countries while business organization use their business strategy to develop specific plan to gain competitive advantages.

The similarities between business strategy and military strategy are both organization strategies need effective leadership to manage process and progress. Both strategies are concerned with ways to succeed against opponents. Human resource is one of the important factors in business and military strategy because without human resource strategy idea cannot come in action. Both business and military strategy main objective is to gain competitive advantage by utilizing competitor's weakness (Scribd, 2010). Both military and business strategy analyzes enemy strength and weakness and compare with own to develop winning strategy. According to Maeshall (2011) military and business strategy require unity of command that is good communication, understanding and agreement by all strategic members in order to get best result.

The difference between business and military strategy is business strategy focus on the stakeholder value and customer value where as military strategy focus on country and public security. Business strategy is mainly horizontal structure i.e. for strategy development business leader take ideas from lower level staff, but military strategy is mostly vertical structure i.e. well defined chain of commands and strategy is only made by top level of officers. Pappas (2010) states that business strategy is developed, implemented and evaluated depending on the market competition, inflation, economic growth etc but military strategy is devised depending on the assumption of international conflict. (307 words)