"What is strategy?" Johnson and Scholes said: "Strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations".
How Strategy is Managed is why we study Strategic Management. In its broadest sense, strategic management is about taking "strategic decisions" In practice, a thorough strategic management process has three main components, shown in the figure below:
To assess FedEx case we use Strategic Analysis
This is all about the analyzing the strength of businesses' position and understanding the important external factors that may influence that position. The process of Strategic Analysis can be assisted by a number of tools, including:
PESTEL Analysis - a technique for understanding the "environment" in which a business operates
Five Forces Analysis - a technique for identifying the forces which affect the level of competition in an industry
Value Chain Analysis - describes the activities that take place in a business and relates them to an analysis of the competitive strength of the business.
PESTEL analysis is concerned with the environmental influences on a business. The acronym stands for the Political, Economic, Social and Technological issues that could affect the strategic development of a business.
Identifying PESTEL influences is a useful way of summarizing the external environment in which a business operates. However, it must be followed up by consideration of how a business should respond to these influences.
Apply to the case of FedEx, PETEL factors can be defined as the following:
Political/Legal factors
Government deregulation of the airline industry which permitted the landing of larger freight planes, thus reducing operating costs for FedEx.
Deregulation