Components of Corporate Strategy Implementation to Ensure a Competitive Advantage

The success of corporate strategy implementation has become the focus of many organisations in order for them to sustain a competitive advantage. Strategic management helps organisations to set a vision, a mission and objectives that will enable them to survive and operate within a competitive environment. However, many organisations have experienced little success in the implementation of corporate strategy, mainly because of poor implementation and not because of the strategy itself. Many factors may affect the implementation of corporate strategy within any organisation, such as lack of resources, poor communication and resistance to change. The main objective of this research was to determine how small and medium consulting businesses were implementing corporate strategies to ensure sustainability and growth. To achieve this objective, a qualitative approach was used with the aim of understanding, analysing and evaluating the success of corporate strategy implementation of small and medium consulting businesses. Data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 13 small and medium consulting business owners/managers in the central business district. The empirical findings indicated that corporate strategy implementation, with specific reference to the components of implementation, made a significant contribution to the sustainability, growth and performance of small and medium consulting businesses. Owners/managers of these businesses should ensure that the strategy applied is communicated effectively to the staff members for them to embrace the implementation and understand and adopt the strategy; however, the lack of a strategy implementation can cause the failure of these businesses.