Aspects of strategic direction of enterprises

The article examines aspects of the strategic direction of enterprise activity. We proceed from the fact that the enterprise, by definition, is a purposeful, open system that exchanges goods and material values, energy, and information with the external environment. Pay attention to the strategic direction of the enterprise’s activities from the point of view of its management to maintain its level of system excellence, particularly system potential and the ability for sustainable development. The management of domestic enterprises still perceives most aspects of strategic management as formal processes that are declared but, in fact, still need to form the basis of the enterprise’s activity and, accordingly, reduce the potential for achieving long-term sustainable results in practice. If the management of the enterprise does not deal with these issues, then the staff, depending on the system of their values and culture as a way of life, will consider their work at the enterprise within the scope of their activities. More likely, only from achieving their own goals and satisfying personal interests. The most attention is paid to the task of the enterprise’s mission as an element of a set of strategic targets. However, there is currently no single approach to developing the company’s mission. Considering the list of elements of the mission and choosing those that are most relevant from the point of view of the current system state of the enterprise in the context of its strategic direction is directly reflected in the choice and implementation of the approach to the formation of the mission of the enterprise. The functioning of the enterprise in the direction of the defined mission becomes possible thanks to the establishment and achievement of the goals of its activity. At that time, the goal is a specific state of the desired result in the future, which the company seeks to achieve. The mission of the enterprise and the strategic goals of activity arising from it allow the enterprise to coordinate the level of system potential, harmonizing its ambitions with the state of the external environment in which it operates. The target orientations are the basis of the strategic direction of the enterprise’s activity and determine its future desired state, in particular, the possibility of being potentially competitive in market conditions in the long term. Also, they enable the company’s management to look from the future into the present and determine what actions must be performed by everyone inside the company today to achieve a particular state in the future. In general, it can be said that the task of targeting strategic landmarks allows the enterprise to acquire such characteristics that provide it with the possibility of long-term effective functioning in a highly competitive market environment. In this regard, it is relevant to consider the approaches to the task of target strategic orientations of the enterprise, which exist today in foreign and domestic theory and practice of strategic management. Keywords: strategic management, strategic guidelines, enterprise, strategic direction.