ABSTRACT
The distinction between strategic and operational management may seem artificial to many managers. In the case of small businesses, in particular, their very strength would seem to lie in the ability to treat and manage the business as a whole. In practice the same manager handles both strategic and operational functions. Not that managers of small businesses possess the resources to act otherwise, even if that was an accepted goal. Managers of large business empires, for their part, do have the necessary resources to bring about the separation of functions, but are nevertheless inclined to take the same view as managers of small businesses. Even in the larger setting they like to view and manage the totality of what goes on and position themselves to have a finger in every pie. The crucial difference between the two situations, however, is that while managers of small businesses do succeed in that way, managers of large empires generally do not. For reasons explained in Chapter 5 they run, almost inevitably, into the phenomenon of the single channel capacity bottleneck. They are short of the attention-time available to deal with matters that require protracted consideration. In the event, strategic decisions tend to be made impulsively and treated as an extension of operational behaviour.
