Their decisions range all the way from forecasting future resource requirements to solving employee problems that threaten productivity. The decision-making domain of middle managers can usefully be characterized as partly operational and partly strategic, with constant fluctuations.
Strategic management is the third level of three-tiered management control. Strategic managers look outward from the organization to the future, making decisions that will guide middle and operations managers in the months and years ahead.
Strategic managers work in a highly uncertain decision-making environment. Through statements of goals and the determination of strategies and policies to achieve them, strategic managers actually define the organization as a whole. Theirs is the broad picture, wherein the company decides to develop new product lines, divest itself of unprofitable ventures, acquire other compatible companies, or even allow itself to be acquired or merged.
There are sharp contrasts among the decision makers on many dimensions. For instance, strategic managers have multiple decision objectives, whereas operations managers have single ones. It is often difficult for high-level managers to identify problems, but it is easy for operations managers to do so. Strategic managers are faced with semistructured problems, whereas lowerlevel managers deal mostly with structured problems.
The alternative solutions to a problem facing the strategic managers are often difficult to articulate, but the alternatives that operations managers work with are usually easy to enumerate. Strategic managers most often make one-time decisions, whereas the decisions made by operations managers tend to be repetitive.