Strategic Management Practices at Make Me Smile, Kenya

Abstract

Strategic management remains to be the cornerstone to all organizations hence, the absence of strategic management practices within an organization would mean that an organization does not know its course and direction. Regardless of the size of organizations, they must practice strategic management to excel in their operations. Organizations must continually link to the external environment and align their strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats. This was a case study on the strategic management practices adopted by Make Me Smile Kenya, and the objectives of the study were to establish strategic management practices at Make Me Smile, Kenya, and to ascertain the challenges faced by Make Me Smile Kenya in applying the strategic management practices. The data was collected using primary data sources that included interview guides as the tool for data collection, the respondents included the organizations top level managers within the organization. The findings of the study have revealed that MMS does indeed have the knowledge of the strategic management process and that the organization possessed a dedicated team of employees, invested its time and resources, it has highly invested in modern technology to make sure that its team of managers have the capability to undertake the process of strategic management. The study found out that strategic management practices are embraced and implemented by MMS and that these practices have been of benefit to the organization and its operations helping it stay clear of its goals and objectives and have well-defined means of achieving the set goals is strategic management is correctly practiced. The researcher discovered that just like any other organization, Make Me Smile does experience a few challenges during the strategy implementation process, these challenges were seen mostly in communication which is vital to all the employees because they all need to be conscious of the organization’s goals and objectives. The organization uses the MMS HH supervision tool to deal with the challenge to help ease communication. The study concludes that strategic management does have a positive impact on Make Me Smile Kenya as an organization. The study recommends that processes of Strategy formulation, implementation and evaluation should be continuously enhanced based on the everchanging environment, in a turbulent environment there should be a continuous review and enhancement of the processes of strategy communication within the organizations to attain efficiency and effectiveness of the strategy implementation process. In conclusion, the study showed that strategic management practices are embraced and implemented by MMS and that these practices have been of benefit to the organization and its operations helping it stay clear of its goals and objectives and have well-defined means of achieving the set goals is strategic management is correctly practiced.