Дата публикации: 30.09.2024
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF IMPROVING STRATEGIC
MANAGEMENT IN KAZAKHSTAN
Tumanov Aybat
Master’s student of the EMBA Strategic Management educational program
L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University
Astana, Kazakhstan
Abstract
The article analyzes the results of interviews of managers who actually participated in strategic management procedures while working at Kazakhstan's medium-sized industrial enterprises. The problems and prospects of improving strategic management in Kazakhstan are considered in the context of General world trends and new scientific ideas. Based on the results of the interview, proposals for improving the methodology of strategic management were formulated.
Key words: strategic management, interviews, rules and procedures, information base, global trends.
The implementation of most modern management concepts (such as BSC, TQM, TQM) assumes and implies that the company must have a strategy. However, despite the fact that many books and articles on strategic management have been published since the early 70s, and today, when developing a strategy, company managers often face unresolved fundamental issues For decades, experts have argued that a business must necessarily follow a set of rules for strategic management, which includes a very extensive set of methods for each of the stages - because otherwise It is impossible to develop a successful strategy. And they offered their services that were not free at all: strategy development requires special qualifications, conducting a significant amount of research, analyzing information that is not publicly available, and attracting many highly paid specialists to conduct expert assessments.
The actual transformation of strategic management from a scientific discipline into a branch of the consulting services industry has led to the fact that the scientific level of empirical research in the field of strategic management has significantly decreased. Many innovations in the field of strategic management that have appeared in recent years had as their main goal advertising and brand formation of their authors, whose main occupation and earnings are consulting. Let's try to establish:
- to what extent these global trends are inherent in Kazakhstani management;
- what new scientific ideas can be used to improve strategic management in Kazakhstan.
The term "strategic management" is originally introduced into scientific circulation to denote a special type of management aimed at accelerated business development by organizing balanced interaction with the external environment (as opposed to management as day-to-day control over business processes). However, numerous empirical studies of the 80s and 90s have shown that strategic management is rapidly losing its importance in a dynamic business environment where the key conditions for survival are innovation, flexibility and the ability to quickly respond to instantly emerging and just as quickly disappearing opportunities [1]. In such circumstances, even the most meticulous observance of all the rules of strategic planning developed in the conditions does not guarantee the company's success. One of the fundamental achievements of management theory at the end of the 20th century was the proof of the conceptual limitations of forecasting.
-the "cases" on which Western business schools are based are devoted to analyzing the "success stories" of companies; their leaders publicly and demonstratively ignored the basic provisions of the theory of strategic management;
- a sign of success for many Western top managers was a public demonstration of confidence that compliance with the rules of strategic management no longer guarantees their companies succeed in the competition. The consequence of all this was the "displacement of strategy from companies" - so in 2004. Porter described the practice of strategic management in developed countries [2]. According to the authors of the Harvard Business Review Russia, in most Western corporations:
- "as a rule, the word "strategy" is used by top managers mainly to give themselves a smart look, appear as a leader and avoid pressing choices strategy is perceived by them as a way for the company to move from its current position to the desired one, but an absolutely not guaranteed future" [3];
- "the standard process of creating a strategy is familiar, soothing and practically useless activities" [4];
- "strategy in practice is often just a formality, observance of an unencumbered ritual" [5].
Similar trends are noted by Kazakhstani researchers:
- "in Kazakhstani companies, the current problems are the lack of strategic thinking"[6];
- "top management has to devote all its time to issues of current operational activities and is simply unable to manage strategically" [7]. In order to identify pressing problems and prospects for improving strategic management in Kazakhstan, we conducted a survey of 46 managers of industrial enterprises of medium-sized businesses with relevant professional experience. As a method of data collection, we used an interview - with open questions, semi-structured, conducted over the phone.
The conditions for the respondents' participation in the interview were:
- availability of professional competencies and relevant practical experience;
- volunteerism: all potential participants were previously sent a script containing questions for discussion and incentive material on the topic; the decision on participation or non-participation in the interview was made by a potential participant of the survey after familiarization with these texts;
- anonymity: the obligation not to disclose personal data and any other information related to the name of the enterprises where the respondents work.
Based on the results of the interview, came to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the majority of respondents have an inherent recognition that the practice of strategic management has turned into its imitation, has become a complex ritual, the full observance of which is characterized in terms of "long, expensive, unreliable, inaccessible for many medium-sized enterprises and for all small businesses";
- the inability to change the established practice due to the systemic imperfection of the theory of strategic management of business organizations, due to the inconsistency of the archaic competition models laid down in its basis with the modern realities of competition. On the other hand, they are characterized by: - recognition of the need for strategic planning as a prerequisite for the successful application of any other management concepts and technologies;
- readiness to accept any innovations in the field of strategic planning is the main thing is that they allow us to develop a truly workable strategy.
Managers of Kazakhstani industrial enterprises of medium-sized businesses, who previously participated in strategic management procedures, are the critically important group that is most ready to introduce innovations in the field of strategic management and is a potential "driver of change". In their opinion, the following scientific ideas of M. Porter can become a conceptual alternative to the clearly lost predictive power and outdated methodology of strategic management:
- strategy in the latter interpretation is defined by him as:
a) the search and development of an individual, unique way of competition;
b) the development of a new special kind of value, and not an attempt to produce the same kind the values (of the product) are simply better;
c) not the result, but an endless cyclical process [2];
- to facilitate the choice of a strategy from the countless possible options, of course, you can use a basic list of strategic alternatives (as well as a standard set of rules, stages, tools and methods of strategic management); but it is not necessary to strictly adhere to any of the many options developed so far. The main value of the strategy is:
a) in its uniqueness and
b) in its "proportionality" to the scale of the problems facing the organization.
Conclusion
In modern conditions, "the collapse of globalism and the reinvention of the world".
1. Strategy is a set of rules according to which an information and analytical system works, which allows timely transition from one action program to another, timely and promptly changing the priorities of a business organization.
2. The process of forming a strategy should be understood: - not so much as the development of a "clear program of action" (the use of information technology and special software allows you to automate this process);
3. The information base of strategic management can no longer be a retrospective linear analysis of market development in the past (trends and trends of previous years may change their focus at any moment). We will have to abandon the processing of databases using mathematical models based on linear programming methods and from identifying patterns based on the analysis of time series (economic indicators of previous periods). The information base for strategic management of business organizations is not database analysis, but a forecast based on a nonlinear risk assessment model.
References:
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