Strategic management is the management and leadership of a strategy framework that will position an organization for sustainable superior performance through time and then actually achieve the superior performance through time.
Strategy framework– holistic framework for continuously asking and answering key strategic questions
Superior performance– performance at the level of #1 or #2 in the respective competitive arena or against a known benchmark – like earning more than the weighted cost of capital, or any other notion of winning compared to an agreed to reference point
Key strategic questions – paradigmatic questions about an organization’s strategy that emanate from a respective school of strategy thought. The most widely known is the Positioning School, best promulgated in my view by the Harvard Business School Competitive Strategy Group. Another example is the Systems Dynamics School
Strategy – an aligned, mutually supportive, linked and hard-to-copy set of choices – activities, capabilities, resources and actions – that allows the discovery of new opportunities and that expects to achieve superior performance against an agreed to performance reference point through time