Paul Graham

If you’re an outsider, don’t be ruled by plans. Planning is often just a weakness forced on those who delegate.

Mintzberg’s Taxonomy of Organizational Forms

According to Henry Mintzberg, an organization’s structure is largely determined by the variety one finds in its environment. For Mintzberg, environmental variety is determined by both environmental complexity and the pace of change. He identifies four types of organizational form, which are associated with four combinations of complexity and change.

Strategy Is . . . A Lot of Things

Strategy means so many things to so many people that it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation about strategy unless you define your terms.

How Industries Evolve: Principles for Achieving and Sustaining Superior Performance

From Xerox to K-Mart to Sotheby’s, great companies have failed to translate extraordinary innovation into better profitability. Why does this happen? Anita M. McGahan argues that great companies fail to profit from investments in innovation when they break their industries’ rules for how change can take hold. In this book, she shows how to develop a strategy that is aligned with the rules of industry … [ Read more ]

Building a Strategy-focused Organization

Strategy is very important, but as these co-authors point out, managers’ ability to execute strategy can be more important than the strategy itself. Authors of The Balanced Scoreboard, one of the most influential business books of the last 25 years, Messrs. Kaplan and Norton argue that successful organizations create a performance management program that puts strategy at the center of its management processes. In the … [ Read more ]

Razors and Blades: New Models for Durables

Gillette’s introduction in 1903 of a safety razor with a disposable blade turned out to be brilliant. In fact, many companies, particularly in the durables sector, could benefit from similar strategies. Challenged by faster innovation cycles, aggressive Asian entrants, consolidating retailers, and the growth of private label, they could find new opportunities with their own versions of razors and blades. The authors present four proven … [ Read more ]

Michael Porter

Performing similar activities better than rivals may be essential to superior performance, but tends to drive companies to competitive convergence rather than uniqueness.

What Is Strategy?

We all see business strategy through our own particular lens. Hundreds of books are written every year on business strategy, and the diversity of perspectives can be mind numbing. This often leaves executives who wish to develop a strategy for their business more than a little confused on what exactly their strategy should address, and what tools and techniques should be applied in developing the … [ Read more ]

Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble

Strategy used to be about protecting existing competitive advantage, but not any more. Today it is about finding the next advantage.

Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble

Strategic actions fit into three separate boxes: Box 1 is all about managing the present and improving the current business; Box 2 involves selectively abandoning the past; and Box 3 contains the keys to creating the future.

Market-Driving Organizations: A Framework

The importance of market-driving strategies as an alternative to market-driven strategies is evident in the marketing literature. However, there has been no attempt to integrate market-driving strategies into an encompassing framework. The first section of this paper presents an overview of market-orientation, market-driven, and market-driving strategies. The second section provides a framework to better understand the process involved in creating and implementing a market-driving culture. … [ Read more ]

New Channel Opportunities: The Channel Conflict Strategy Matrix

When suppliers attempt channel change, they face numerous challenges from retaliation to customer rejection. But proper analysis and appropriate strategies can go far toward minimizing the degree of conflict participants must overcome. That is why we developed a channel conflict strategy matrix to identify where conflict may arise and how to weight that conflict when determining channel strategies.

Competitive markets and The Rule of Three

The “Big Three” no longer have the automobile market to themselves, but almost every market, including the one for cars, is ruled by three dominant firms. That reality does not prevent other firms from being successful. However, all firms, regardless of their market share, must still understand The Rule of Three and how it will affect their strategy and attempt to operate efficiently.

Global Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Advantage across Borders

Global Strategy deals with the question of how firms can compete in a global environment. Andrew Inkpen and Kannan Ramaswamy examine the issues considered central to the study of strategic management in a global context, such as the nature of global advantage, strategic alliances, competing in emerging markets, international corporate governance, global knowledge management and ethical issues in international business. Much as been written about … [ Read more ]

Scott D. Anthony, Matt Eyring, and Lib Gibson

When the right strategy is unknown and unknowable–as it so often is with novel growth initiatives–senior managers need to be problem solvers, not dictators.

“Parenting” Style and Performance

When it comes to corporate strategy, managers, like parents, manage and organize companies in different ways. Some focus on strategic planning, others on financial control and still others on strategic control. In the research paper, “A Formal Evaluation of the Performance of Different Corporate Styles in Stable and Turbulent Environments,” Professors Adrián A. Caldar and Joan Enric Ricart test the relationship between “parenting style” and … [ Read more ]

Organizational Transformation Through Business Models: A Framework for Business Model Design

Organizations are increasingly inter-connected as they source talent, goods and services from other organizations located in disparate parts of the world. They seek new ways of creating value for themselves, customers and partners. They operate outside and across traditional industry boundaries and definitions. These innovations have lead to a focus on business models as a fundamental statement of direction and identity. This paper highlights what … [ Read more ]

Ron Adner

The value of most frameworks lies not in changing a manager’s initial intuition but in clarifying the issues that arise when managers with different instincts try to debate the right course of action. A structured framework can transform the debate from a battle of guts, ultimately resolved on the basis of reputation, power, and eloquence (often in that order), into a comparison of the assumptions … [ Read more ]

Marie Kane

Strategic Thinking is about the “What” and the “Why”, that is what should we be doing and why, otherwise known as strategy. Strategic Planning considers the “How” and “When”, but at a very high level. Operational or Tactical Planning concerns itself with the specifics of how and when.