The Fundamental Questions in Strategy

There are 4 fundamental questions that define the field of Strategy:

1. How do firms behave?
2. Why are firms different?
3. What is the function of, or the value added by, the headquarter unit of a diversified firm?
4. What determines success or failure in international competition?

How do firms behave?
Or, do firms really behave like rational actors, and if not, what models of their behaviour should be used by policy makers?

Strategy is about choice of direction for the firm. But what assumptions should the strategist entertain about the choices made by competitive firms, choice that inevitably are interdependent? Is it even reasonable to think of the behaviour of a firm as reflecting "choices", or should a much less rational model be used? The question has two components: (1) the empirical issue of the actual patterns of behaviour observed among firms and (2) the more abstract question of what modeling assumptions are most fruitful in explaining observed patterns or guiding competitive strategy. The dominant assumption used by economists is that the firm behaves like a rational individual. Therefore the question directs attention towards situations in which the dominant assumption is unwise.

• What are the foundation assumptions that differentiate among various models of a firms behaviour?
• Are there predictable biases in firm or organizational behaviour? What do we know about the relationships between organizational size (or other stable characteristics) and behaviour?
• Is a firms behaviour follow the "rational" models of competitive interaction among players engaged in very subtle and complex reasoning?
• Can strategist's deal with the biased behaviour or with the nonrational aspects of a firm's behaviour?

Why are firms different?
Or, what sustains heterogeneity in resources and performance among close competitors despite competition and imitative attempts?

Firms within the same industry differ from one anther, often dramatically. The source of this heterogenity lies at the root of competitive advantage, and understanding why it arises and translating that into how it can be acheived is the central concern here. Competition, it is normally thought, should eliminate differences between competitors. Good practices and successful techniques will be imitated and firms that cannot or will not adopt good practices will be driven from the field. The challenge is therefore to retain the power of equilibrium thinking and still correctly explain the observed differences among competitors. Differences among firms may arise from intention, or they may be created and sustained through property rights, active prevention of imitation, or thorugh natural impediments of limitation and resource flows. In addition these differences may also arise and be sustained throguh differing conceptual views, theories or causal maps, differing organizational processes within firms, different levels of organizational learning and team skills and/or through the action of ambiguity.

• To what extant are differences among firms the result of purposeful differentiation rather than unavoidable heterogeneity in resources and their combinations? That is, should strategy be thought of as the exploitation of existing asymmetry, or the search for and creation of unique resources or market positions?
• Are the most important impediments to equilibrium rooted in market phenomena (eg, first-mover advantages) or are they chiefly rooted in internal organizational phenomena (eg, cultural differences or learning)?
• Is the search for economic rents based on resource heterogeneity contrary to public welfare, or does it act in the public's welfare?

What is the function of, or value added by, the headquarters unit in a diversified firm?
Or, what limits the scope of the firm?
The diversified corporation is the dominant form of business firm in the industrialized world, yet the relative strengths and weaknesses of this organizational form remains poorly understood. In particular, the question of what is, or should be, the value added by the headquarter unit of such firms is of central concern to strategy. Two common views exist - the first emphasizes value creation, and the second emphasizes loss prevention. According to the first viewpoint, the headquarter unit formulates the overall strategy for the corporation including its degree of diversification and organizational form, manages the process of resource allocation among constituent businesses apparently better than unaided capital markets, and maintains the existance of key shared resources and manages the processes by which business units share these resources. By contrast, the loss prevention school sees management as reviewing the strategies of the business units to make sure that logical errors are not made, it monitors the operations of subunits, providing surer supervision of the agents operating the business than would independent board of directors or the competitive marketplace, and can extract free cash flow from a mature business unit at much lower cost.

Subsidiary questions include:

• What is primary, strategy or structure?
• What is primary, the entrepreneurial (value-creating) role or the headquarter unit, or the administrative (loss preventing) role?
• What, if any, are the limits to the amalgamation of business units in multibusiness firms?
• Do firms that impose "strategic management" on portfolios of businesses add value, and if so, what is the mechanism?
• Are there corollaries to headquarters units in nonbusiness organizations and, if so, what are the comparative lessons to be learnt?

What determines success or failure in international competion?
Or, what are the origins of success and what are their particular manifestations in international settings or global competition?
This question has two parts of interest. One part is the more fundamental issue of why some firms enjoy more success than others. What is the dynamic competitive process that leads to the relative success of some firms, and what causes some to decline and some to fail? Another part of the question deals with international competition and the competitiveness of firms, and indeed, of nations and cultures. At stake is not just the survival of the firm or its success, but the quality of life in economies and their respective cultures.

• To what extent do firms from different countries (cultures) possess inherent competitive advantages in certain areas?
• Are there "strategic" industries and if so, what makes them strategic?
• Are there rules for global competition that are not simply the extension of rules for competition within a large nation-state or continent?

Conclusion
These are the four questions that will help define the field of strategy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Fundamental Issues in Strategy; A Research Agenda by Rummelt, Teece

Strategy and Performance: A Backgrounder

Introduction

Strategy, from an enterprise point of view, is concerned with answering two central questions:

1. What business should we be in?
2. How should we compete?

To an external observer, strategy is associated with two questions:

1. How do firms behave?
2. Why are firms different?

This derives from the fact that two firms within the same industry often competed in very different ways. Fundamentally, this heterogenity is a product of the firms' strategy, though management practice, structure and culture do play a part in creating and sustaining these differences.

 

How did strategy originate as a field of study and practice?

 

Mainstream economic theory - the price theory - has traditionally ignored the role of managers and left little scope for strategic choice in economic affairs. From Adam Smith down to the present day, economists have sought to show that a completely decentralized economic system, coordinated only through market prices could be efficient and little attention was given to why private firms might make use of managerial hierarchies to plan and coordinate their activities. The "firm" of economic theory observes market prices and then makes an efficient choice of output quantities, the assumption being that all firms are essentially alike, having the same access to information and technology, and the decisions they make are essentially rational and predictable, compelled only by cost and demand.

 

Seminal work by Banard [1938] stressed the difference between managerial work directed at making the organization efficient, and work that made the organization effective, a distinction critical to the concept of strategy. Simon [1947] extended Banard's ideas in his attempt to build a framework for analyzing a business and Selznick [1957] introduced the idea of a firm's "distinctive competence." Shumpeter [1934] provided an alternative to the static concept of competitive efficiency favoured by most economists, and Knight's [1965] work on the risk-bearing function of entrepreneurs laid an early foundation for much of today's organizational economics.

 

It was Chandler [1962] who showed how executives at some large American companies discovered and developed roles for themselves in making long-term decisions about the direction of the company and then made investments and modified organizational structure to make those strategies work. In formulating a thesis to summarize his findings, Chandler found it convenient to define two terms - strategy and structure.

 

The thesis that different organization forms result from different types of growth can be stated more precisely if the planning and carrying out of such growth is considered a strategy, and the organization devised to administer these enlarged activities and resources, a structure.

 

He defined strategy as "the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, the adoption of a course of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals."

To Banard's concept of strategy, Kenneth Andrews [1965] added Selznick's "distinctive competence" and a notion of an uncertain environment, to which management and the firm had to adapt. In Andrew's views, the environment, through constant change, gave rise to opportunities and threats, and the organization's strengths and weaknesses were adapted to avoid the threats and take advantages of the opportunities. An internal appraisal of strengths and weaknesses led to identification of distinctive competencies; and external appraisal of environmental threats and opportunities led to identification of potential succcess factors. These twin appraisals were the foundation for strategy formulation, a process analytically distinct from strategy implementation.

 

Andrews conceived strategy as akin to identity, defining it as "the pattern of objectives, purposes, or goals and major policies and plans for acheiving these goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be."

 

Igor Ansoff of Lockheed Electronics was more explicit in stating that strategy provided a "common thread" of five component choices (1) product-market scope, (2) growth vector (or direction in which scope was changing, e.g., the emphasis on old versus new products or markets), (3) competitive advantage (unique opportunities in terms of product or market attributes), (4) synergy internally generated  by a combination of capabilities or competencies, and (5) the make or buy decision.

 

In retrospect, it seems that Ansoff was attempting to define what we would today call corporate strategy, while Andrews was more focused on business strategy.

In the same period, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) became best know for its two related conceptual inventions: the experience curve and the growth-share matrix.

 

 

In brief, experience curve theory maintained that whoever captured market share early, whoever gained the most experience in production would end up with the lowest cost and whoever had the lowest cost would have the highest margin. With the highest margin came cash flows and an ability to withstand competition and whatever actions it required.

 

 

Within a few years, such reasoning led to the growth-share matrix, whose terminology of cash cows, dogs, stars and question marks became famous and widely adapted.

 

This was the first time that a clear line of distinction had been made between the two levels  - operational decision making and corporate strategy - though a dichotomy developed in those seeking to understand how strategies were formed and implemented (process) and those seeking to understand the relationship between strategic choice and performance (content).

 

Evolution of the Concept
Late in the 60's and early in the 70's, concepts of strategic and long-term planning played important roles in the field. This movement owed much to the diffusion of war-based planning experience in the corporate field, though much of this was descriptive in nature rather than analytical or empirical.

 

The prominence of long-range planning and then strategic planning, failed to survive the economic turmoil that began with the oil embargo of 1973. Planning processes too easily degenerated into goal-setting exercises, failing to embody any real understanding of competitive advantage. Moreover, when more sophisticated planning process designs were advaned, problems of execution or implementation increased.

Careful observation of actual organizational decision making gave rise to more subtle conceptions of process, in which strategies were arrived at indirectly and, to some degree, unintentionally. Uncertainty led to tentativeness, search and serial trial, and some learning - a chaotic process - which , with a certain amount of luck, might accumulate to a strategy, which could then be named and descried as coherent only ex post. Treatise such as "muddling through", "logical incrementalism" and "emergent strategy" all attempted to gain insight into organizational process which produced strategy as a somewhat intended outcome.

Strategy and Performance

Attempts to understand and test the connection between strategy and performance also began in the 70's. Here, three strands of work need to be highlighted (1) centered at Harvard and following on Chandler, generated and tested propositions about corporate growth and diversification strategies, (2) focusing on business strategies, began with the brewing studies (study of the brewing industry) at Purdue, and (3) also at Harvard, used an industrial organizational perpective to study business strategy, and culminated in Michael Porter's work on analysing competitive strategy and competitive advantage.

 

The goal of the brewing studies was to explore the proposition that performance was a function of strategy and environment.

 

Chandler's pioneering work had also inspired further interest in empirically demonstrating a relationship between growth strategy, organizational form and the expected performance of the enterprise. This led to an understanding of the forms of diversification that improved performance and those that did not.

 

Porter's Five Forces Framework

 

Porter imported into the strategy field, concepts developed over the years in industrial organization (IO) economics, using these to build a general, cross-sectional framework for explaining individual firm performance. The "Five Forces" framework substituted a structured, competitive economic environment, in which the ability to bargain effectively in the face of an "extended rivalry" of competing firms, customers and suppliers determined profit performance. Porter used this framework to define and explain the strategies available to firms in their quest for survival and profit.

 

This bridge to industrial organization economics brought over a number of concepts from that field to research on strategy and performance. Game theory modeling in industrial organization found applications in strategic management. The event-study method of financial economics were used to investigate strategic and organizational change as well as the strategic fit of acquisitions. New security-market performance measures were applied to old questions of diversification and performance, market share and performance among others. Transaction cost viewpoints on scope and integration were adopted and new theories of the efficiency of social bonding were advanced.

 

Studies on innovation began to use the language and logic of economic rents and appropriability, and research in venture capital responded to the agency and adverse selection problems characteristic of that activity. Agency theory perspectives have been used in the study of firm size, diversification, top management compensation and growth.

 

Research on strategy process continued apace. The most vital new ideas were generated by a study of global firms. In the 80's, increasing globalization of the worlds economy led to a careful study of how large multi-national corporations directed and coordinated their myriad resources and activities. The emerging framework represents management as needing to maintain "differentiation" in some activities to acheive gains from specialization, and tight integration in orther areas to acheive economies of scale and focus. In addition, management is seen as actively managing a complex system of linkages among activities, which enables critical coordination and facilitates organizational learning.

The purpose of the description above has follow the advent of research into strategy and performance, which had been to understand real-world phenomena and establish a base for making useful prescriptions. What began in the 60's as a simple concepts of strategy intended to give insight into the phenomena described in cases evolved into a serious search for intellectual foundations.

 

Development and Trends in Allied Disciplines

 

The evolution on the thinking of strategic management increasingly relied on the theories and methods of economics and organizational sociology, as well as on political science and psychology. As a consequence, the boundaries that mark the strategy field have been blurred.

Given these trends, it is important to understand the fundamental questions being asked in allied disciplines and to be aware of the changes sweeping these fields.

Let us take a look at some of these, specifically:

• Economics
• Organizational Sociology
• Political Science

Economics

Of late, at least five concepts have disrupted traditional microeconomics and the neoclassical "theory of the firm" that is taught in b-schools the world over, namely: (1) uncertainty, (2) information assymetry, (3) bounded rationality, (4) opportunism and (5) asset specificity. In various combinations, they are the essential ingredients of new subfields within economics.

 

For example:

• Transaction cost economics rests primarily on the conjunction of bounded rationality, asset specificity and opportunism. The fundamental assertion in transaction cost economics is that transactions should take place in the regime which best economizes on the costs imposed by bounded rationality and opportunism. Within strategic management, transaction cost economics is the ground where economic thinking, straetgy and organizational theory meet. Transactio cost economics begins ith the assertion that one cannot write enforceable contracts that cover all contingencies.
•  Agency theory rests on the combination of opportunism and information assymetry. Agency theory concerns the design of incentive arrangements and the allocation of decision rights among individuals with conflicting preferences or interests. Agency theory makes no presumptions as transaction cost economics, and instead seeks the optimal form of such a contract. Agency theory has two branches:
• Principle-agent is chiefly concerned with the design of optimal incentive contracts between principals and their employees or agents.
• Corporate control is concerned with the design of the financial claims and overall governance structure of the firm and as such is most significant to strategic management. The hypothesis most familiar to strategic management is Jensen's [1986] "free cash flow" theory of leverage and takeovers. According to a BCG diagnosis, most firms mismanaged their portfolios, misusing funds generated by mature cash-rich businesses ("cows"), usually by continuing to reinvest long after growth opportunities had evaporated.
•  Game theory derives much of its punch from assymetries in information and/or in the timing of irreversible expenditures (asset specificity). Modern Game Theory raises deep questions about the nature of rational behaviour. The idea that a rational individual is one who maximizes utility in the face of available information is simpy not sufficient to generate "sensible" equilibria in many noncooperative games with asymmetric information. To obtain "sensible" equlibria, actors must be assigned beliefs about what others' beliefs will be in teh event of irrational acts. Game Theory as applied to an industrial organization has two basic themes of particular interest: committment strategies and reputations.
• Committment is central to strategy and among the committment games that have been analyzed are those involving investment in specific assets and excess capacity, research and development with and without spillovers, horizontal mergers and financial structure.
• Reputations arise in game where firms or actors may belong to various "types" and others must form beliefs about which type is the true one. For example, a customer's belief (probability) that a seller is of the "honest" type constitutes the seller's reputation, and that reputation can be lost if the seller behaves in a way that changes th customer's beliefs. Reputation can also describe relationships within the firm, and the collection of employee beliefs and reputations can be collectively called its "culture".
•  The evolutionary theory of the firm and of technological change rests chiefly on uncertainty and bounded rationality. Firms compete primarily through a struggle to improve and innovate. In this struggle, firms grope towards better methods with only a partial understanding of the causal structure of their own capabilities and of the technological opportunity set. Key to their view is the idea that organizational capacities are based on routines which are not explicitly comprehended, but which are developed and bettered with repetition and practice. This micro-link to learning-by-doing means that the current capability of the firm is a function of history, and implies that it is impossible to simple copy best practice even when it is observed. And because evolutionary economics posits a firm that cannot change its strategy or structure easily or quickly, the field has a very close affinity to population ecology views in organizational theory. Both challenge the naive view that firms can change strategies easily, or that changes will even matter when attempted and made.

Each of these five subfields have generated insights and themes important to strategic management.

 

Organizational Sociology

 

The fundamental issue addressed by sociology is the structure and subjective meaning of social interaction. The centre of the puzzle was and continues to be the stability of social strucutres and the amazingly strong controlling forces they exert on their members actions. Two concerns distinguish the sociologists approach: an interest in authority and a real concern with the subjective experience of social interaction. Traditionally, organizational sociology has been concerned with the processes whereby authority is legitimized (accepted), with the general problem of social structure in society, and with the limits and dysfunctions of bureaucracy.

 

From the mid-60's through the 70's, contingency theory synthesis emerged and was widely disseminated. Contingency theory is built on a variety of earlier insights, like for example, that high performing organizations did not have the same structure, but matched structure to the technological demands of production. Contingency theory hypothesised that organizations which contain sub-systems "matched" to their environment perform better that those with a less perfect fit. Under competition, this implies that structure follows environment and must be able to cope with uncertainty, the most important variable in the environment. If strategy is taken to include choice of environment, this becomes consistent with the dictum that structure follows strategy.

Sub-fields of organizational sociology that are relevant to strategic management include:

• Resource Dependence: Who or what determines what organzations do? The resource dependence model argues tthat much of what organizations do is determined by outsiders - by those parties who control the flow of critical resources upon which the organization depends. The strategic activities of management, according to this perspective, are those of accomodating or finding ways to insulate the organization from the demands of those who control critical resources. Resource dependence theory also speaks of the distribution of power within organizations, specially those who can influence external parties or the flow of discretionary resources.
• Organizational Ecology: Economics, and to a large extent, strategic management, view the firm as actively adapting to changed conditions.Organization ecology makes the opporite presumption - that firms do not adapt. Instead of the adaptive firm, organization ecology sees a population of firms that change in composition over time as some flourish, others perish, and new organizations are born. It sees the strategy of a firm as fixed at its inception and as unchanging over time, quite at odds with the literature on strategic change. However, strategic change may well be the exception rather than the rule, and strategic inertia appears more realistic than the economist's assumption of rapid, rational response to change. The study of organizational culture is another developing stream of thought that intersects organizational sociology in many areas. Culture is sometimes seen as an impediment to change and at other times as the source of unusual excellence. In either case, the technology of changing, protecting or creating culture is at a very primitive state of development.

Political Science

The systematic investigation of political structures and processes has a tradition extending back to the Greek philosophers. And like strategic management, political science lacks a central, generally accepted paradigm, and its many streams are not tied together in any coherent way. However two dramatic shifts in paradigm have occurred in the last 50 years. The first was the "behavioural revolution" that commenced in the 1950s as contrasted against the classical "rational" models. researchers began to look at what political actors actually did rather than at descriptions of rules and structure or at a framer's expectations.

The second paradigm shift was political science's own "new institutionalism". Among its antecedents were the many empiracal studies of voting - effects of blocs, splinter groups, rules and so forth, on voting behaviour and outcomes. New institutionalism in political science also included abstract and rigorous analysis of how individual preferences combine through voting to produce political outcomes.

Bottomline
Each of the allied disciplines speaks to a unique metaphor. Economics is concerned with public welfare and wealth distribution in society. Sociology is concerned with groups of individuals and their activities as groups. Political science is concerned with choices made by groups where the objective function is diffuse and specified by the group itself. Psychology is concerned with individuals, the mind, and individual behaviour. That all of these have something to do with individuals in combination with group choices and welfare is evident. But what of strategic management?

Strategic management has to do with groups, their birth and their continuing success. It does not assume that the groups purpose is beneficial, but simply that the group forms and tries to exist because it has purpose. Moreover, groups exist within a context, and the context governs conditions of success. It is the managements responsibility to see that the gorup adapts to its context, and survival in the end is an objective definition of success. So the perspective is that of the management team assigned the responsibility of ensuring success, with success defined as either the entrepreneurial act of starting an organization, or those acts that condition survival.

The fundamental issues addressed by strategic managemetn then are different from those addressed by the allied disciplines themselves. Related they are to be sure, but different perspectives seperate their domains of enquiry, and one must expect different fundamental questions to be addressed by each discipline.

Bibliography

1. Fundamental Issues in Strategy: A Research Agenda by Rumelt, Teece and Schendel [HBS Press; 1994]

What is strategy?

Strategy includes those subjects of primary concern to senior management, or to anyone seeking reasons for success and failure among organizations. Firms are in competition - competion for factor inputs, competition for customers, and ultimately, competions for revenues that cover the costs of their chosen manner of surviving.

Because of competition, firms have choices to make if they are to survive. Those that are strategic include: the selection of goals; the choice of products and services to offer; the design and configurationof policies determining how the firm positions itself to compete in product markets (eg, competitive strategy); the choice of an appropriate level of scope and diversity; and the design of organization structure, administrative systems and policies used to define and coordinate work.

It is a basic proposition of strategy, that these choices have critical influcence on the success of failure of the enterprise, and that they must be integrated.

It is the integration (or reinforcing pattern) among these choices that makes the set a strategy.

Strategy can be defined as the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals - Alfred Chandler [Strategy and Structure; 1960]

Strategy is a pattern of objectives, purposes, or goals and major policies and plans for acheiving these goals, stated in such a way asto define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be - Kenneth Andrew [Business Policy: Text and Cases, 1965]

Strategy, or defining what an organization will be, and why, and to whom that will matter, is at the heart of a leader's role. The strategist is the meaning maker, the voice of reason. The strategist rely's on hard data to ensure that design, product lineup, pricing, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and logistics, not to mention organizational culture and management are tightly coordinated, internally consistent and interlocking. He creates a system of resources and activiies that worked together and reinforced each other to create value. For every moving part in the system there are two choices - either it contributes to system end goals or it does not and has to be rebuilt. Strategists call such choices identity-conferring committments. They are central to what an organization is or wants to be and reflect what it stands for.

References:
1. Montgomery, Cynthia A: How strategists lead, McKinsey Quarterly July 2012 

Dogma vs Doctrine

Dogma is defined as:

1. something held as an established opinion; especially a definite authoritative tenet;
2. a code of such tenets;
3. a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds;
4. an authoritative principle or belief or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true; 
5. a doctrine or a corpus of doctrines relating to matters such as morality or faith, set forth in an authoritative manner

Synonyms: doctrine, teachings, principle, opinion, article, belief, creed, tenet, precept, credo, article of faith, code of belief

Doctrine is defined as:

1. A principle or body of principles presented for acceptance or beilef, as by a religious, political, scientific or philosophical group
2. A rule or principle of law, especially when established by precedent
3. A statement of official governent policy, especially in foreign affairs and military strategy;
4. Something taught; a teaching;

Synonyms: teaching, principle, belief, opinion, article, concept, conviction, canon, creed, dogma, tenet, percept, article of faith.

The terms dogma and doctrine is sometimes used interchangeably though doctrine is formalized dogma that is encoded, ie, formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by an organization, for example, the church, a political organization or the military, for its members. It is philosophy or school of thought.

Examples are the dogma of Immaculate Conception of the church or the Marxist dogma of communists.

From a military perspective, a doctrine is the fundamental principles by which the military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives. It is authoritative but requires judgement in application.

Let us take a look at a few example of commonly held doctrines:

1. nuclear deterrence is the military doctrine that an enemy will be deterred from using nuclear weapons as long as he can be destroyed as a consequence.
2. abolitionism is the doctrine that calls for the abolition of slavery;
3. amoralism is the doctrine that moral distinctions are invalid;
4. laissez faire is an economic doctrine that opposes governmental regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free-enterprise sstem to operate according to its own economic laws;
5. internationalism, the doctrine that nations should cooperate because their common interests are more important than their differences;
6. democracy, the doctrine the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group;
7. multiculturism, the doctrine that several different cultures (rather than one national culture) can coexist peacefully and equitably in a single country;

About this blog

This has been an area of interest and at the core of my consulting business for a long while. I have been through a lot of literature on the matter as a part of my regular research on the subject and I have also seen it in action at various businesses around the world. It is a fascinating field that delves into the mind of the entrepreneur.

Why link strategy and performance?
Strategy is ultimately about what an organization plans to do to become and stay successful. In that sense, it is a long-term game plan that gives the organization its scope and direction. And performance is about measures that determine how well strategy is being implemented.

The link therefore, is intrinsic.

Through this blog, I intend to clarify some of my own thoughts on the subject of strategy and performance, taking examples from companies I come across on a regular basis.

I also intend to expand it to cover strategy as it pertains to nation states and explore its linkages to military security strategy in the Indian context in order to see whether some of the tools and techniques can be applied to make the strategic processes in government more integrated and easier to understand to its citizens and by inference, to the various departments of the government that appear to work, more often than not, at cross purposes all the time.