Strategic management is the art, science, and craft of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term goals. It is the process of specifying the organization's mission, vision, and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement policies, plans, projects, and programs. Strategic management seeks to coordinate and integrate the activities of a company's various functional areas in order to achieve long-term organizational goals. A Balanced Scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the company and its progress towards objectives. Strategic management depends on answering three key questions:1. What are my company's goals?2. What are the best ways to achieve these goals?3. What resources are needed to achieve this goal? To answer the first question it is necessary to seriously reflect on what the company's final objectives are. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to facilitate or enable? What is the best possible outcome your company can aspire to? Digging deeper to uncover a company's core objectives can involve several steps: • Assess the landscape within which the company will operate and formulate how the company sees its role within that landscape. This is commonly known as a mission statement. • Set goals to address some of the unmet needs, taking both a long- and short-term view of what the company can offer. This is commonly known as a vision statement.• Set out the goals the company has for itself, bo...... center of paper......the future.16. Strategic management is more of a state of mind than a rigid process.17. A military connotation of strategic management is “he hasn't won all the wars, but he has avoided many ambushes”.18. Strategic management is especially useful for companies with unique or differentiated products for niche, specialized, or differentiated product markets.19. Strategic planning comes before business planning. Strategic planning is used to identify and evaluate alternative business strategies. Business planning is used to implement a business strategy.20. Strategic planning is more words and fewer numbers than business planning.21. A strategic plan is a “living” document that changes as your goals and resources evolve. “Successful strategic management does not have to end with the last annual meeting or the final compilation of the strategic planning document.”