Strategic management can be defined as the art and science of formulating, implementing,
and evaluating cross-functional decisions that enable an organization to achieve its objectives.
As this definition implies, strategic management focuses on integrating management,
marketing, finance/accounting, production/operations, research and development, and
information systems to achieve organizational success. The term strategic management in
this text is used synonymously with the term strategic planning. The latter term is more
often used in the business world, whereas the former is often used in academia. Sometimes
the term strategic management is used to refer to strategy formulation, implementation, and
evaluation, with strategic planning referring only to strategy formulation. The purpose of
strategic management is to exploit and create new and different opportunities for tomorrow;
long-range planning, in contrast, tries to optimize for tomorrow the trends of today.