There are several challenges for strategic management in developing countries (based on my experience and knowledge):
- Data: finding data is a real challenge becasue there is available statistics are far below those available in developing countries. Most companies try to keep any financial information and consider them secrets. It is not possible to know the demand in last year of a certain product or service. People are not used to market research and they don’t want to talk to the marketing people
- Employees: most employees and managers are not aware about the value of strategic planning and they may consider it waste of time and something that is applicable in developed countries
- Owners: Many owners of successful companies believe they don’t need to do strategic planning and they do not know that their success will go one day when there are more competitors or there are changes in the market.
- Managers’ selection: Most company’s managers in developing countries are experts in the technical process of the organization but they are not well educated in management and thus they want to focus on what they know and neglect what they do not know. Accordingly, strategic management does not fall in their area of interest
- Qualitative Analysis: Strategic planning needs a lot of forecasting and qualitative analysis besides the quantitative analysis. Many technical managers are not used to neither the qualitative analysis nor the forecasting.
- “I am the manager”: The strategy shows a guide for decisions,so, an employee may, sometimes, tell the senior manager that his decision is against the company strategy. Thus the manager avoid having a strategy to keep his freedom to decide whatever he likes
- “Analysis” versus “Intuition”: Most people do not think that a manager should do analysis or have done for him they think that some people are talented to take the right decision without doing many calculations or having subordinates make a study for them.
- Implementation: To get every manager follow the same strategy is not an easy task
- Investors: Having a clear strategic plan and clear goals for the future (other than increasing sales of the current products) does not affect the stock price because most of the investors do not care about those issues
- Security: Most managers feel that everything is a
secret and obviously they think that no one else should know the
strategy and thus no one else should make a study for our strategic
plan….and there is no strategy
