What Is Strategy: What Is Strategy?

What is Strategy?

There are few more confusing concepts in management than “strategy”. What is strategy? My quick, working definition: Strategy is the validation – expression, elaboration and extension – of what works. It is the configuration of operative means with desired ends.

It implies that strategy is best thought of as a progression rather than a “thing”. Strategy-making does not occur in the emptiness. There is always an organizational framework, where some pre-existing activities are going on that seem to work to help the organization sustain. These activities have also been called proficiencies or capabilities. Strategy is a validation – it is a reflective process that makes logical sense of behaviors, connecting them together, often supplying a reason that was not seen at the time that the strategy was developed. Thus strategy happens in space and time – context matters. In summary, strategy has to be thought about ecologically rather than in a context-free logical way. I favor to think of strategy as an adjective, as in ‘strategic management’, as a stage in the existence of an organization. (Executive Strategy: Strategic Management and Information Technology)

Porter’s concept of strategy

A key feature of the book The New Ecology of Leadership: Mastering Business in a Chaotic World is the importance of asking good questions if one wants to get good answers. “What is strategy?” tends to specify that it is a “thing”, an object of some kind. The very question limits the answers we can get. Thus when Michael Porter asked “What is Strategy?” (HBR’s 10 Must Read on Strategy), he determined that it was “the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities” from one’s rivals. It required the ...

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...y? What purpose does it serve?

• Where is strategy? Where is strategy developed?

• How is strategy? How is strategy developed? How is it executed?

In my view the answers to all these questions begins with “it depends…” That is context where the firm is in space and time really matters. If it’s a new innovative firm trying to develop a new product or service, then the strategy is likely to be evolving. If it is in mid-life and still growing strategy will be clearly articulated and well understood. As organization progresses, strategy tend to degenerate into philosophy, as the link between means and ends, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ becomes tattered and broken. At its worst, strategy can become a verbal cover for the exercise of raw power, vindicating actions that are taken for reasons that have nothing to do with improving the fortunes of the organization’s stakeholders.