ABSTRACT
As mentioned in previous chapters, the purpose of the new Professional Postgraduate Diploma
is to improve your potential to being a senior strategic thinker within your organization. Your
newly acquired skills should support your role which will be to improve your ability to critically
analyse and evaluate business situations so as to identify opportunities and threats in addition
to recommending on how to best exploit these opportunities and minimize these threats
respectively. Organizations require strategic thinkers in order to improve the chances of their
future survival through improved decision-making and risk minimization. In order for you to be
able to identify, describe and communicate business issues as well as their magnitude will rely
upon your ability to utilize appropriate frameworks as well as defining appropriate metrics.
Therefore prior to delving into an evaluation of the external, internal, customer and competitive
environment of an organization Units 2-4 are there to get you to think of analytical tools and
measures that you will require as well as thinking about applying them. Remember it is not
enough for you just to be able to recite relevant theory but you should also think about its
applicability to the particular situation identifying its potential limitations.
