Problems encountered while implementing business strategies: A research in the city of Afyonkarahisar

Even though strategy implementation phase is the most important phase of the strategic management, researchers and practitioners in this field, has given lip emphasize on this issue in other words it has been neglected. In most of the strategic management books, strategy implementation has only found a few pages for itself while authors generally give hundreds of pages on strategy formulation phase therefore there is a huge and important lacuna appeared on strategy implementation phase in literature. According to the recent emprical studies on strategy implementation, it is found that only %10 to %30 of formulated strategies can be successfully implemented. When we look at the strategic management literature, it can be seen that while there are a lot of generally accepted theories exist and widely used by companies as like; bcg matrix, grand strategy matrix, swot analysis in strategy formulation phase, there is no widely used or generally accepted implementation theory exist. In other words, although in theory there are a lot of theories exist in formulation phase which show companies what to do in which conditions, there is little information and guide exist how to implement them. In this study implementation problems of the medium and large sized companies in Afyonkarahisar has been revealed. At the end of the study, it is found out that most commonly occuring implementation problems are insufficiency of the qualifications of employees and problems appeared from external environment. Key Words: Strategy, Strategic Management, Strategy Formulation, Strategy Implementation