Business is conducted and organisations are run successfully by people placed in responsible positions by mandate and with authority to plan, organise, execute, supervise and monitor results, outcomes and performances and determine how to improve on areas or flanks that demand innovative inputs for a sustainable future growth of the system. It is noteworthy to state that without strict adherence and proper management, any system that operates at variance with the guided policies and principles of a well structured foundation of corporate governance, is bound to derail from achieving the expected goals of organisational sustainability. Under such a situation, failure sets in; hence, retrogressive manifestations take over in the entire organisational operations. If no action is quickly taken to reverse and correct the unfavourable trend, total system collapse occurs. It is on this note that strategic management is considered as a veritable concept in managing businesses and organisations for sustainability. This is maintained through the recorded outcomes of great economic prosperity and impressive performances that point towards the system’s growth and development. To actualise such a feat in a turbulent or challenging environment requires that the potential successful operators are those that are armed with the virtues and skills to create ideas at challenging, tough and trying times. Such individuals could be classified as possessing the characteristic qualities of entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship, therefore, is nothing more than the implementation steps taken beyond managing a new business or any other organisation, in a strategic manner. The relationship gap between entrepreneurship and strategic management in this situation depicts the thin line separating both concepts, which, of course, are closely knitted; with overlap in actualising real enterprise goals (gains and profit) for economic growth and development in their endeavours. To understand the similarities between entrepreneurship and strategic governance better, achieving the long term goals as programmed in the process of formulating, implementing, and evaluating the organisation’s direction (the planned focused targets) is in every intent and purpose, similar to the ultimate aim of starting a new business (making profit); pursued with inherent potentials to develop, organise and run a business enterprise in the face of any unforeseen circumstances. This narrative gives the exact and true picture of the similarities between what entrepreneurship and strategic management mean, in the simplest terms. Both of them, in management studies, end up producing the same economic results for growth and development (either at micro or macro levels in any given economic system).
Economic growth and political advancement (for businesses or countries) are well known processes for recording performance outcomes, and both processes follow the line of a management plan that carefully considers circumstances that impact outcomes. These could also negatively be off the expected trajectory, but they are meant to be strategically controlled or managed, and properly bitten back into planned, desired alignments for the purpose of maintaining sustainable long term programmed positive outcomes. Philosophically, strategic management is crucial for growth, however it is considered, and in whichever dimension. It involves analysing all factors in and around the system, for the process of mapping expected objectives through developed strategies that are effectively monitored by rated performance indices, while executing or implementing the planned programmes and agenda. These expected positive growth outcomes are essentially aligned with adequate resources effectively engaged for efficient performances on services that are competitively rendered, or products supplied from a vantage position against other contemporaries in the same sector. This is the sure key to sustainable growth.
Strategic management in a broader sense could be effectively utilised or applied by nations and businesses for economic advancement and growth, through recognition of the great importance and vital role of the private sector towards national development. The contributions expected of members of the organised private sector in any economy can significantly put a sovereign nation on a sound and comfortable footing, economically. This is because, all the economic indices are better influenced and managed by business promoters and operators in the market place through their several economic and commercial activities (carried out on a daily basis), once they are well protected by government through the creation of an enabling environment that allows business operators go about their respective daily business activities (without molestation); and through government policies that support business promotion and healthy competition. Business growth and national development should be pursued by governments at all levels by optimally engaging every going concern in the economy, in a manner that small businesses are supported through enlightenment programmes to better organise their daily activities to achieve orderliness even in the minutest accounting principles of daily bookkeeping (for record purposes), enabling commercial banks and microfinance banks to lay their hands on documentation that would assist in supporting small businesses to grow.
This is the duty of the government: to apply business development measures through government agencies to promote business, to support the private sector in every economic area. This is what would ultimately, in a cumulative manner, positively and greatly rub off to the advantage of the nation’s economic growth.
