Strategic issues you need to contend with in long term business management

In many small and medium sized businesses the directors double as managers. They may often be unclear about the extent to which they are thinking and behaving strategically as opposed to operationally. Difficulty might arise because in any one day business leaders switch between strategy and tactics without realizing it. The danger in this pattern is time and resources for strategic issues are sacrificed. on day-to-day issues. There is a natural tendency to focus to the here and now to address today's problems and to feel more comfortable steering away from the uncertainties of the longer term which could also be very complex. You need a way of assessing the balance of time spent on issues that concern the here and now and those of the future. There is a set of criteria that can be used to identify strategic processes and decisions.
Strategic decisions involve the following:
-Relating to the full scope of an organization's activities
-The products it chooses to produce
-The markets it wishes to operate in
-The key areas in which it wishes to focus its competitive efforts.
-Where it draws boundaries according to which activities are external or internal to its organization.

Matching an organization's activities to the environment by:
-Responding to perceived threats in the environment
-Exploiting identified opportunities.

Matching the activities of an organization: to its resource capability and its capability to change.

-Building on what the organization is capable of today
-Devoting necessary resources to extending and enhancing existing capability.
-Allocating scarce major resources in the organization to the critical areas
-Looking at three to five years beyond the next budget horizon.