Cultural implications of business strategy-making

The central issue in strategy formulation and implementation process, or strategy-making, is the identification of environmental forces and the preparation of a plan of action to deal with them. This necessitates scanning the environment for gathering information. Environmental scanning should enable the firm to identify these forces. Doing this not only calls for information gathering, but also for deciding what to look for, where to look, and what to select from the very large amount of information available. These steps are based on culturally programmed perception processes. Also, strategy-making requires assessing internal capabilities of the firm. Both, internal and external steps in the strategy-making process involve perception and thinking, both of which are influenced by culture. Therefore, country differences can be expected in each step. In this regard, the process of strategy making varies among managers of different cultures. This paper addresses these issues and discusses implications of cultural differences on the strategy-making process.