International Strategic Management (ISM) is an ongoing management planning process aimed at developing strategies to allow an organization to expand abroad and compete internationally. Strategic planning is used in the process of developing a particular international strategy.
An organization must be able to determine what products or services they intend to sell, where and how the organization will make these products or services, where they will sell them, and how the organization will acquire the necessary resources for these tasks. Even more importantly an organization must have a strategy on how it expects to outperform its competitors.
When an organization moves from being a domestic entity to an international organization it must consider the possible broad complexities that accompany such a decision. In a domestic country, an organization must only consider one national government, a single currency and accounting system, one political and legal system, and usually a similar culture. Entering into one or more foreign countries can involve multiple governments, currencies, accounting systems, legal systems, and a large variety of languages and cultures. This can create numerous barriers to entry for an organization looking to expand internationally.
In foreign countries, there are the possibility of: