Wikipedia:Featured article removal candidates/Strategic management

Strategic management

 * Article is no longer a featured article.

The opening paragraph:


 * Strategic management is the process of specifying an organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources so as to implement the plans. It is the highest level of managerial activity, usually performed by the company's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive team. It provides overall direction to the whole enterprise. An organization's strategy must be appropriate for its resources, circumstances, and objectives. The process involves matching the company's strategic advantages to the business environment the organization faces. One objective of an overall corporate strategy is to put the organization into a position to carry out its mission effectively and efficiently. A good corporate strategy should integrate an organization's goals, policies, and action sequences (tactics) into a cohesive whole. To see how strategic management relates to other forms of management, see management.

This article was nominated in October, 2004. Prose like this arouses something close to moral revulsion in me. My judgment may be suspect, so please bear with me.

I'm not sure that "Strategic management is the process of specifying an organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources so as to implement the plans" says anything more than "Strategic management is the process of running an organization" does. I also feel no wiser upon being told that "An organization's strategy must be appropriate for its resources, circumstances, and objectives." More than 32K of this stuff and I tend to get a bit glassy-eyed. I get the impression that if someone were to edit out all the empty abstractions, tautologies, and buzzwords from the article, we'd be left with a stub suitable for merger somewhere. I remember when "featured articles" used to be "brilliant prose" and this stuff ain't it.

Specific criterion not met: 2a. &mdash; Smerdis of Tlön 19:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * October 2004 FAC
 * No request for references or writing improvements


 * Comment: Smerdis, I haven't seen the article, but I've seen a lot worse prose than this in FAs. Sure, the paragraph you quote needs polishing, but why not explicate specific problems in it to support your nomination? Tony 00:21, 14 April 2006 (UTC) PS I have no problem with the "Strategic management sentence"—your suggested replacement removes useful detail.
 * My suggestions imply that I am probably the wrong person to try and edit this stuff, or even suggest how it could be edited. At least it goes to great lengths to state the obvious.  How about "Strategic management is deciding what an organization should do, and how to do it?"  Smerdis of Tlön 04:26, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


 * remove! Not only is this a poorly written and unsourced article, it turns out its a massive copyright violation of this PDF. I'm slapping a copyright violation tag on the article so if people want to read the article they need to read this version. I can't believe this is a featured article. This sad news about this article is that the copyright violations in it go back well over a year to before it became a FA.--Alabamaboy 20:03, 13 April 2006 (UTC) Thank goodness it wasn't a copyright violation and my bad on not catching that the European Union agency was committing plagiarism. Still, the article lacks any references (let alone inline citations), is poorly written, lacks illustrations, and should be removed.--Alabamaboy 20:21, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment Actually it looks like that source is compiled from the wikipedia article... I guess it needs some looking into. Just another star in the night T 20:12, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, Wikipedia is cited as a reference in that article at the bottom of the first page. We must be just even in the face of the Enemy. Smerdis of Tlön 20:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Weak remove: Wiggle words and empty, self-negating phrases are par for business, but we don't have to embrace that language. After all, we're not going to repeat the wording of the people spoken of: we're supposed to be clearer than the originals, as one function of an encyclopedia is to paraphrase and explicate knotted subjects.  To the degree that "strategic managment" has any meaning at all, it's the article's duty to explain what it means in terminology that isn't so much a semantic Mobius strip.  Geogre 12:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Remove, very difficult and opaque prose, not written in an encyclopedic style at all. Sentences like "SWOT Analysis: I/O Economics for the external factors and RBV for the internal factors" do not serve to explain much. Andrew Levine 16:40, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


 * remove per nom & andrew levine Zzzzz 11:17, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * This is an invalid request as nothing was brought up on the talk page to give the authors a chance to improve it. Please detail any problems on the talk page, contact the main author and give it some time to be worked on. Only then nominate here. - Taxman Talk 14:32, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * If you think that would help, I suppose I could try. Smerdis of Tlön 16:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * actually it is valid as the new criteria was only added *after* this article was already listed. Zzzzz 11:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, that is not correct, it's been in there for quite a while, I just made it much more obvious because this and some other nominations have missed it. - Taxman Talk 11:41, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment: were this a valid nomination, I would definitely say remove.  Anville 18:05, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * This might be a case for invoking WP:SENSE. Derex 17:46, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * After reading through the article again, it seems so horribly bad that I would eagerly ride roughshod over the niceties of FARC procedure. Remove to maintain the integrity of the FA system.  Anville 12:22, 17 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Remove - Jargon-filled, bad grammar, poor use of punctuation, poor use of wiki markup bold text, subheads are not parallel in structure, possible original research, lack of any useful citations. Reads more like a wikibooks entry than an encyclopedia entry. (I'm tempted to list it as a transwiki) Davodd 10:18, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove vapid. Would clearly not pass as a FA under current standards, hence should be removed. Derex 17:44, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove. Several inaccuracies. Example: Porter's five forces model is not "like a SWOT analysis with structure and purpose". Since the five forces are a way of modeling the competition in a whole industry, they don't have anything to do with the internal characteristics of individual firms (strengths and weaknesses). Five forces analysis is industry-centric; SWOT analysis is specific to a firm. Rhobite 23:12, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove. This is one of the longest and most arduous articles I have come across here. Not "brilliant prose" by any standard. --Danaman5 21:25, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Update. Per Taxman's suggestion, I raised a number of concerns about this article on the talk page.  Rhobite pointed out that the article I nominated had been vandalized, or at least severely edited.  Mike Rosoft reverted the article to a previous version. The reverted article now has references &mdash; extensive ones &mdash; but it still strikes me as full of buzzwords, tautologies, and empty abstractions of a kind I can only call "process-cruft": attempts to make simple aspects of planning appear regimented and complex by dividing them into finely ground categories.  If business people actually planned like this, nothing would get done. I am slowly being moved to go on the warpath against this kind of hinkeldreck in business and economics articles.  I still support removal, but would suggest that the discussion be extended and that people revisit the current version of the article.  Smerdis of Tlön 14:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove reads like a seminar scam. Needs in-line citations, rather than a list of dubious "references" most of which appear to have never been incorporated anywhere in the text. savidan(talk) (e@) 16:39, 29 April 2006 (UTC)