Book review and commentary: good strategy/bad strategy: the difference and why it matters (original) (raw)

The Past, Present, and Future of Strategy: Broadening Challenges; Advancing Insight

In this perspective article, Derek Abell, former Professor of Harvard, founder of IMD (Swiss) and ESMT (Germany), presents the perspective of strategy management and strategy management evolution in an executive view. The objective is to provide mainly the students and practitioners a broad view of strategy evolution and its’ future challenges.

The Winding Road of Corporate Strategy

Revista Pensamento Contemporâneo em Administração, 2018

This paper addresses the issue of Corporate Strategy aiming to answer four research questions: " what is Strategy about? " , " who shapes the Strategy? " , " what is new about Strategic Management? " and " what is wrong with Strategic Management? " To do so, the study was based on a systematic exploratory research and bibliographic review. For each question, a specific set of authors were selected, mainly based on books and papers published in relevant academic journals. A set of theoretical propositions is presented at the end of each analysis, in an attempt to summarize the main findings. Overall, the paper shows that corporate strategy is a complex and intricate issue, in constant evolution but, at the same time, with many problems still to be solved.

Strategy past; strategy futures

Long Range Planning, 1997

hood it is beginning to ask questions about its new identity. Like many young adults, it is concerned about its roots and about where it is heading. The choice of a future direction is influenced by those origins and the viewpoint they have formed. This can be coloured by history, discipline, culture or, simply, the prevailing 'dominant paradigm'. The latter, when transferred into an organizational 'recipe',* can induce strong cases of cognitive calcification, so limiting interpretation and creativity. This is as true for academics as it is for practitioners. In a recent survey,t strategy scholars were asked for their perception of seminal contributions to the development of thought in the area. A number of patterns were discernible in their answers. First, consensus on a common pathway was limited due to the many disciplinary avenues down which the development of strategy has had to travel. So their selections were many and varied. Second, there was a distinct difference in the choices by scholars from the strategy *After the work of Grinyer, P.H. and Spender, J.C., see references.

Strategy as a field of study: Why search for a new paradigm

Long Range Planning, 1995

The fundamental structural transitions in a wide variety of industries brought about by major catalysts such as deregulation, global competition, technological discontinuities, and changing customer expectations are imposing new strains on managers around the world. Old recipes do not work anymore. Managers, concerned with restoring competitiveness of their firms, are abandoning traditional approaches to strategy; they are searching for new approaches that give guidance in a turbulent environment. Many academics, confronted with the same reality, are reexamining the relevance of the concepts and tools of the strategy field. In the absence of a consistent and useful strategy paradigm that they can use, managers appear to have embraced attention to 'implementation' as their saviour, more or less abandoning strategy as either unimportant or uninteresting. Academics continue to search for new approaches. This special issue of the Strategic Management Journal presents creative and new thinking dealing with substantive issues and methodologies that can lead to the evolution of a new paradigm(s). As we entered the 1990s, strategy as a field of study had fallen on hard times. Humbled by new global competitors, managers were consumed with TQM, reengineering, downsizing, teamwork and employee empowerment. Managerial preoccupation was with 'catching up' with the best of breed among their competitors. Issues of strategy seemed either remote, unimportant or uninteresting to many. The key words were 'implementation' and 'execution'. Strategy, some managers seemed to assume, was easy; implementation was the hard part. As a consequence, strategy staffs were dramatically reduced or eliminated. Consultants readjusted their wares to cope with the new client demands. Even wellknown consulting firms, such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), who built their Key words: Strategy paradigms, innovative strategy research, paradigm evolution I See, for example, the focus of BCG on 'Time Based Competition'. Two senior consultants of BCG wrote the very popular book on the subject, George Stalk, Jr. and Thomas M. Hout, (1990). Competing Against Time: How Time Based Competition is Reshaping Global Markers, Free Press, New York.

Strategic Management Journal DYNAMICS OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE STRATEGY CONCEPT 1962–2008: A CO-WORD ANALYSIS

The aim of this paper is to extend recent reflection on the evolution of strategic management by analyzing the field's object of study: strategy. We show how the concept of strategy has formed the backbone of the development of strategic management as an academic field and how consensus regarding it has evolved in the academic community during the stages of its historical development. We also address changes in the structure of the definition as it evolved through the growth of internal consistency, the centrality degree of the key terms that have shaped it, and how this evolution fostered the emergence of new research topics during the development of the discipline.

The Field of Strategy::: In Search of a Walking Stick

European Management Journal, 2005

After more than twenty years of commitment to the field of strategy, we are still wondering if the academic field of strategy exists. There have been excellent and exhaustive reviews by authors such as Rumelt, Schendel and Teece (1994), Whittington (1996); Hitt & Tyler (1991), and Pettigrew, Thomas and Whittington (2001), and many others, but most take note of the extreme diversity of the research, and shy away from providing a convincing framework to clarify what the field is all about. To develop this theme further, at the 2002 Academy of Management meeting in Denver, one of us asked the same question of some of the pioneers in the "Strategy section." 1

Strategy –Not a universal Formula

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of applying the principles of strategy to organizations in any context in order to pursue success. Nevertheless, also this paper will discuss the idea that the strategy in not a universal formula, because there is none an existing linear reality with same frames and results, furthermore they change every time, thus the strategy and formula must change and fit to every new scenario in today's multidimensional scopes.