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Environmental Characteristics That Influence Strategic Decisions
Gabriela Valdes
January 11, 2014
M1A2

Strategic decisions have major resource propositions for an organization. These decisions may be concerned with possessing new resources, organizing others or reallocating others. The decisions deal with harmonizing organizational resource capabilities with the threats and opportunities. Strategic decisions also deal with the range of organizational activities. It is all about what they want the organization to be like and to be about it also involves a change of major kind since an organization operates in ever-changing environment. Which makes strategic decisions complex. To devise and implement an effective marketing strategy it is important to evaluate the environmental characteristics which include competitive, political-legal, economic, technological, and social-cultural (Kurtz & Boone, 2012). The task environment of a business includes the components of the environment that the company deals with directly, such as customers, suppliers and competitors. Customers are the central stakeholders in strategic decision-making. Any decision that sidelines the needs of the customers can potentially lead to loss of business. The political risk in a decision is the risk that political factors will invalidate the strategy and perhaps severely damage the firm. The economic environment is an important influence at local and national level. Economic factors have a direct impact on the potential attractiveness of various strategies. For example when interest rates raise, funds needed for capital expansion become more costly or unavailable. Social, cultural, demographic and environmental changes have a major impact upon virtually all products, services, markets and customers. Not to mention the internet is acting as a national and even global economic engine that's spurring productivity, a critical factor in a country's ability to improve living standards....