Strategic Directions
Positioning firms to successfully address opportunities and obstacles presented by external trends and serve as the foundation for developing strategic goals that will impact accomplishment of the business mission and vision (Westphal and Frederickson,2002). Strategic directions can take many forms, related to the achievement of specific challenging goals: proactive is defined by Erdogan and Bauer (2005)as taking dramatic strategic actions to influence changes and believes that unstable, rapidly changing environments provide more opportunities; deliberate is based on intentions before making important strategic decisions, and based on a pattern of decisions that seeks advice from all the firm's functional areas and outside experts (Fuller-Love and Cooper,2000);innovative can be defined as the implementation of a new possibly idea, practice or product by the relevant unit of adoption that exploiting on R&D and technological improvement (Huang and Lin,2006);strategic risk defined as "risks that arise in pursuit of business objectives-either by exploiting opportunities and/or reducing threats"(Emblemasge and Kjolstad,2002);competitive strategy is a function of the way the firm manages the various activities: speed with relative to the competition, focuses on specialized markets, cut costs and taking advantage of economies of scale. Each of these activities builds value to the customers, creating and maintaining competitive advantages over rivals (Porter, 2003).