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Summary book: " Exploring Strategy ', Johnson, G., Scholes,

K. and Whittington, R.
Strategisch Management (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

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Chapter 1: Introducing Strategy

Strategy: Long-term direction of an organization
Long-term: strategies are typically measured over years
Three horizons framework: every organization should think of itself as
comprising three types of business or activity defined by their horizons
Horizon 1: Extend and defend core business
Horizon 2: Build emerging businesses
Horizon 3: Create viable options
Levels of strategy:
Corporate-level strategy: concerned with the overall scope of an organization and how
value is added to the constituent businesses of the organizational whole.
Business-level strategy: about how the individual businesses should compete in their
particular markets (also called competitive strategy).
Operational strategies: concerned with how the components of an organization deliver
effectively the corporate- and business-level strategies in terms of resources,
processes and people.
Strategy statements: should have tree main themes: the fundamental goals the organization
seeks, which typically draw on the organizations stated mission, vision and objectives; the
scope or domain of the organisations activities; and the particular advantages or capabilities
it has to deliver all of these
Mission: Overriding purpose of the organization
Vision: The desired future state of the organization
Objectives: More precise and ideally quantifiable statement of the organisationss
goals over some period of time.
Scope:
The Exploring Strategy Model:
- Understanding the strategic position of an organization (context);
- Assessing strategic choices for the future (content);
- Managing strategy in action (process)
Strategic position: environment (oppurtunities and threats), the organisationss strategic
capability (resources and competences, strengths and weaknesses), the organizations purpose
and the organsiations culture
Strategic choices: the options for strategy in terms of both the directions in which strategy
might move and the methods by which strategy might be pursued.
Strategy in action: about how strategies are formed and how they are implemented
The Strategy Lenses: ways of looking at strategy issues differently in order to generate many
insights
- Strategy as design
- Strategy as experience
- Strategy as variety
- Strategy as discourse (using language to frame strategic problems)

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Chapter 2: The Environment

The environment:
- The Macro-Environment
- Industry (or sector)
- Competitors and Markets
The Macro-Environment: Consists broad environmental factors that impact to a greater of
lesser extent on almost all organizations.
PESTEL framework: categorizes environmental influences into six main types:
- Political
- Economic
- Social
- Technological
- Environmental
- legal
Key drivers for change: the environmental factors likely to have a high impact on the
success or failure of strategy
Industries and Sectors: An industry is a group of firms producing products and services that
are essentially the same. Industries and sectors are made up of several specific markets.
Porters five forces framework: Indentifies the attractiveness of an industry in terms of five
competitive forces:
- the threat of entry
barriers to entry: scale and experience, access to supply or distribution channels,
expected retaliation, legislation or government action, differentiation
- the threat of substitutes
substitutes come from outside the incumbents industry
- the power of buyers
buyer power is high when: concentrated buyers, low switching costs and/or buyer
competition threat (buyer has capability to supply itself)
- the power of suppliers
supplier power is high when: concentrated suppliers, high switching costs, supplier
competition threat
- the extent rivalry between competitors
Competitive rivals are organizations with similar products and services aimed at the
same customer group
Where the five forces are high, industries are not attractive to compete in.
6th force: the existence of organizations that are complementors: if customers value your
product more when they also have the other organizations product. If its more attractive
for suppliers to provide resources to you when they are also supplying the other
organization.

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Types of industries:
- Monopoly: industry with just one firm and therefore no competitive rivalry
- Oligopoly: just a few firms dominate and industry, with the potential for limited
rivalry and great power over buyers and suppliers
- Hyper competition: occurs where the frequency, boldness and aggression of
competitor interactions accelerate to create a condition of constant disequilibrium and
change.
- Perfect competition: where barriers to entry are low, there are many equal rivals each
with very similar products, and information about competitors is freely available.
Value net: a map of organizations in a business environment demonstrating opportunities for
value-creating cooperation as well as competition
Competitors and markets: Market is a group of customers for specific products or services
that are essentially the same
Strategic groups: organizations within an industry or sector with similar strategic
characteristics, following similar strategies or competing on similar bases.
Market segment: a group of customers who have similar needs that are different from
customer needs in other parts of the market. (niches)
Blue oceans: New market spaces where competition is minimized.
Strategy canvas: compares competitors according to their performance on key success
factors in order to develop strategies based on creating new market spaces
Critical success factors: those factors that are either particularly valued by customers
or which provide a significant advantage in terms of cost
Value curves: a graphic description of how customers perceive competitors relative
performance across the critical success factors
Value innovation: creation of new market space by excelling on established critical
success factors on which competitors are performing badly and/or by creating new
critical success factors representing previously unrecognized customer wants.

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Chapter 3: Strategic Capabilities

Resource based view: the competitive advantage and superior performance of an
organization is explained by the distinctiveness of its capabilities
Strategic capabilities: capabilities of an organization that contribute to its long-term survival
or competitive advantage
- Resources: assets that organizations have or can call upon
- Competences: ways those assets are used or deployed effectively
Dynamic capabilities: an organizations ability to renew and recreate its strategic capabilities
to meet the needs of changing environments
Threshold capabilities: those needed for an organization to meet the necessary requirements
to compete in a given market and achieve parity with competitors in that market.
Core competences: the linked set of skills, activities and resources that, together, deliver
customer value, differentiate a business from its competitors and, potentially, can be extended
and developed
Developing and sustaining competitive advantage
Vrin: four key criteria by which capabilities can be assessed in terms of their providing a
basis for achieving sustainable competitive advantage
- Value: when they provide potential competitive advantage in a market at a cost that
allows an organization to realize acceptable levels of return
- Rarity: when capabilities are possessed uniquely by one organization or by a few
others
- Inimitability: capabilities that competitors find difficult to imitate or obtain
Complexity, causal ambiguity, culture and history, change
- Non-substitutability:
Organizational knowledge: the collective intelligence, specific to an organization,
accumulated through both formal systems and the shared experience of people in that
organization
Diagnosing strategic capabilities
Benchmarking: understanding how an organization compares with others
Value chain: describes the categories of activities within an organization which, together,
create a product or service
1. Primary activities: logistics, operations, marketing and sales, and service
2. Support activities: firm infrastructure. human resources, technology and procurement.
Value network: the set of inter-organizational links and relationships that are necessary to
create a product or service
Profit pools: refer to the different levels of profit available at different parts of the
value network
Activity mapping: indentifying more detailed activities which underpin strategic capabilities
SWOT analysis: Summarizes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats likely to
impact on strategy development

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Chapter 4: Strategic Purpose

Stakeholders: individuals or groups that depend on an organization to fulfill their own goals
and on whom, in turn, the organization depends.
Strategic purpose
Mission statement: provides employees and stakeholders with clarity about the overriding
purpose of the organization.
Vision statement: concerned with the desired future state of the organization
Statements of corporate values: they communicate the underlying and enduring core
principles that guide an organizations strategy and define the way that the organization
should operate
Objectives: statements of specific outcomes that are to be achieved.
Corporate governance: Concerned with the structures and systems of control by which
managers are held accountable to those who have a legitimate stake in an organization.
Governance chain: Shows the roles and relationships of different groups involved in the
governance of an organization.
Two governance structures:
- Shareholder model: higher rate of return, encouragement of economic growth,
- Stakeholder model:
Social responsibility and ethics
Corporate social responsibility: the commitment by organizations to behave ethically and
contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and
their families as wel as the local community and society at large.
- The laissez-faire view: only responsibility of business is to make a profit and provide
for the interest of shareholders.
- Enlightened self-interest: tempered with recognition of the long-term financial benefit
to the shareholder of well-managed relationships with other stakeholders
- Forum for stakeholder interaction: incorporates multiple stakeholder interests and
expectations rather than just shareholders as influences on organizational purposes and
strategies.
- Shapers of society: financial considerations as of secondary importance or a constraint.

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Chapter 5: Culture and Strategy

Strategic drift: The tendency for strategies to develop incrementally on the basis of historical
and cultural influences, but fail to keep pace with a changing environment
Fases:
1: Incremental Change (strategic change keeps up with the little environmental change)
2: Strategic drift (environmental change but strategic change stays same)
3: Flux (downturn in performance)
4: Transformational change of death
Historical influences
Path dependency: Where early events and decisions establish policy paths that have lasting
effects on subsequent events and decisions.
Cultural influences
Organizational culture: The taken-for-granted assumptions and behaviors that make sense of
peoples organizational context and therefore contributes to how groups of people respond
and behave in relation to issues the face.
- National and regional cultures
- Organizational field: community of organizations that interact more frequently with
one another than with those outside of the field and that have developed a shared
meaning system
Legitimacy: concerned with meeting the expectations within an organizational
field in terms of assumptions, behaviors and strategies.
- Organizational culture: values, beliefs, behaviors and paradigm(taken for granted
assumptions)
Cultural web: Shows the behavioral, physical and symbolic manifestations of a culture
- Core: Paradigm
- Routines: the way doing thing around here
- Rituals: activities or special events that emphasize, highlight or reinforce what is
important in the culture
- Stories
- Symbols: objects, events, acts or people that convey, maintain or create meaning over
and above their functional purpose.
- Power: the ability of individuals or groups to persuade, induce or coerce others into
following certain courses of actions
- Organizational structures: the roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships in
organizations
- Control systems: the formal and informal ways of monitoring and supporting people
within and around an organization

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Chapter 6: Business Strategy

Bussines Strategy: Generic strategies and Interactive Strategies
Strategic Business Units: Supplies goods or services for a distinct domain of activity. Market
based or capabilities based.
Generic Strategies
Competitive strategy: concerned with how a strategic business unit achieves competitive
advantage in its domain of activity
Competitive advantage: how an SBU creates value for its users both greater than the costs of
supplying them and superior to that of rival SBUs.
- Having lower costs
- Have products that are exceptional valuable to customers
Porter defines 3 generic strategies:
- Cost leadership: broad target, lower cost: economies of scale
With parity: charge same prices, translating cost advantage wholly into extra profit
With proximity: lower price than average lower costs but still better profits than the
average competitor
- Differentiation: broad target, differentiation: higher prices
- Focus: Narrow target cost focus of differentiation focus
The Strategy Clock: Another way of approaching the generic strategies
- Differentiation zone: differentiation with and without price premium, focused
differentiation
- Low price zone: no frills: low benefits and low prices
- Hybrid strategy zone
- Non-competitive strategies zone: low benefits and high prices
Strategic lock in: uses become dependent on a supplier and are unable to use another supplier
without substantial switching costs
Interactive strategies
Hypercompetitive strategy: demands speed and initiative. Small moves rather than big
moves, be unpredictable, mislead the competition
Cooperation
Game theory: encourages an organization to consider competitors likely moves and the
implications of these moves for its own strategy. This is particularly relevant where
competitors are interdependent. So where the outcome of choices made by one competitor is
dependent on the choices made by other competitors.

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Chapter 7: Corporate strategy and diversification

Scope: Is concerned with how far an organization should be diversified in terms of products
and markets.
Strategy directions:
Diversification: Increasing the range of products or markets served by an organization.
Related diversification: Diversifying into products or services with relationships to the
existing business.
The Ansoff product/market growth matrix

Market penetration: Implies increasing share of current markets with the current product
range. Retaliation from competitors and legal constraints are two possible constraints.
Product development: Where organizations deliver modified or new products (or services) to
existing markets. Despite the potential for relatedness, product development can be an
expensive and high risk activity because: new strategic capabilities, project manager risk.
Market development: Involves offering existing products to new markets. New users of new
geographies.
Conglomerate diversification: Involves diversifying into products or services with no
relationships tot the existing businesses.
Diversification drivers:
- Exploiting economies of scope: Refers to efficiency gains through applying the
organizations existing resources or competences to new markets or services.
- Stretching corporate management competences. Dominant logic: The set of corporate
level managerial competences applied across the portfolio of businesses.
- Exploiting superior internal processes
- Increasing market power: Increases the potential for mutual forbearance: The ability
to retaliate across the whole range of the portfolio acts to discourage the competitor
from making any aggressive moves at all.
Synergy: The benefits gained where activities or assets complement each other so that their
combined effect is greater than the sum of the parts.
Diversification and performance:

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Vertical integration: Entering activities where the organization is its own supplier or
customer. Thus it involves operating at another stage of the value network.
Backward integration: refers to development into activities concerned with the inputs into
the companys current business
Forward integration: refers to development into activities concerned with the outputs of a
companys current business.
Dis-integrate: Outsourcing: The process by which activities previously carried out internally
are subcontracted to external suppliers.
The decision to integrate or subcontract rests on the balance between two distinct factors:
- Relative strategic capabilities: Does the subcontractor have the potential to do the
work significantly better?
- Risk of opportunism: Is the subcontractor likely to take advantage of the relationship
over time?
Value creation and the corporate parent:
Value-adding activities:
- Envisioning: The corporate parent can provide a clear overall vision or strategic intent
for its business units.
- Coaching and facilitating: The corporate parent can help business unit managers
develop strategic capabilities.
- Providing central services and resources
- Intervening: The corporate arent should be able to closely monitor business unit
performance and improve performance either by replacing weak managers or by
assisting them in turning around their businesses.
Value-destroying activities:
- Adding management costs
- Adding bureaucratic complexity
- Obscuring financial performance
3 types of corporate parenting:

Portfolio manager: Operates as an active investor in a way that shareholders in the stock
market are either too dispersed or too inexpert to be able to do.
Synergy manager: A corporate parent seeking to enhance value for business units by
managing synergies across business units.
Parental developer: Seeks to employ its own central capabilities to add value to its
businesses.

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Portfolio matrices
The BCQ (or growth/share) Matrix: Uses market share and market growth criteria for
determining the attractiveness and balance of a business portfolio.

The directional policy (GE-McKinsky) matrix: Positions business units according to how
attractive the relevant market is and the competitive strength of the SBU in that market.
The parenting matrix: the Ashridge Porfolio display

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Chapter 8: International Strategy

International strategy: Refers to a range of options for operating outside an organizations
country of origin.
Global strategy: Involves high coordination of extensive activities disperses geographically
in many countries around the world
Internationalization drivers:
Yips globalization framework: Sees international strategy potential as determined by
market drivers, cost drivers, government drivers and competitive drivers.
Market drivers: Similar customer needs, global customers, transferable marketing
Cost drivers: Scale economies, country-specific differences, favorable logistics.
Government drivers: Trade policies, technical standards, host government policies.
Competitive drivers: Interdependence between countries, competitors global
strategies
Geographic sources of advantage:
Locational advantage: Porters diamond: Suggests that Locational advantage may stem
from local factor conditions; local demand conditions; local related and supporting industries
and from local firm strategy structure and rivalry.
The international value network
Global sourcing: Purchasing services and components from the most appropriate suppliers
around the world regardless of their location
International Strategies:
Global-local dilemma: Relates to the extent to which products and services may be
standardized across national boundaries or need to be adapted to meet the requirements of
specific national markets.
- Simple export: Concentration of activities in one country, low coordination of
activities
- Multidomestic; Loosely coordinated internationally but involves a dispersion overseas
of various activities
- Complex export: Still involves location of most activities in a single country, but
builds on more coordinated marketing.
- Global strategy: Highly coordinated activities disperses geographically around the
world
Market selection and entry:
Ghemawats CAGE framework: Emphasizes the importance of cultural, administrative,
geographical and economic distance.
Types of entry: Exporting, licensing and franchising, joint ventures, wholly owned
subsidiaries.
The staged international expansion model: Proposes a sequential process whereby
companies gradually increase their commitment to newly entered markets, as they build
market knowledge and capabilities.
Roles in an international portfolio:
- Strategic leader
- Contributors
- Implementers
- Blackholes

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Chapter 9: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation dilemmas
Innovation: Involves the conversion of new knowledge into a new product, process or service
and the putting of this new product, process or service into actual use.
- Technology push or market pull
- Product or process innovation
- Open or closed innovation. Open innovation: the deliberate import and export of
knowledge by an organization in order to accelerate and enhance innovation.
- Technological or business-model innovation. Business model: describes how an
organization manages incomes and costs through the structural arrangement of its
activities.
Innovation diffusion:
Diffusion: the process by which innovations spread amongst users.
The pace of diffusion:
- Degree of improvement
- Compatibility
- Complexity
- Experimentation (free initial trial periods)
- Relationship management (how easy is it to get information etc.)
- Market awareness (Consumer awareness)
- Network effects
- Customer innovativeness
Diffusion S-curve: Reflects a process of initial slow adoption of innovation, followed by a
rapid acceleration in diffusion, leading to a plateau representing the limit to demand
Tipping point: where demand for a product suddenly takes off, with explosive growth
Tripping point: when demand suddenly collapses
Innovators and followers:
First-mover advantage: Where an organization is better off than its competitors as a result of
being first to market with a new product, process or service.
Disruptive innovation: creates substantial growth by offering a new performance trajectory
that, even if initially inferior to the performance of existing technologies, has the potential to
become markedly superior.
Entrepreneurship and relationships:
Entrepreneurial life cycle: Progresses through start-up, growth, maturity and exit
Social entrepreneurs: Individuals and groups who create independent organization to
mobilize ideas and resources to address social problems, typically earning revenues but on a
not-for-profit basis.
17blz, 19, 19, 20

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Chapter 10: Mergers, Acquisitions and alliances

Organic development: where a strategy is pursued by building on and developing an
organizations own capabilities. It can be either continuous or radical. Radical is corporate
entrepreneurship
Corporate entrepreneurship: refers to radical change in the organizations business, driven
principally by the organizations own capabilities.
Mergers and acquisitions:
Acquisition: One firm taking over the ownership of another, hence the alternative term
takeover.
Merger: Combination of two previously separate organizations, typically as more or less
equal partners.
Motives for M&As:
Strategic: extension, consolidation (increasing power), capabilities
Financial: financial efficiency, tax efficiency, asset stripping or unbundling
Managerial: personal ambition, bandwagon effects
M&As processes:
Target choice: strategic fit, organizational fit
Valuation
Integration: the extent of strategic independence, the need for organizational autonomy

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Strategic alliances: Where two or more organizations share resources and activities to pursue
a strategy
Collective strategy: About how the whole network of alliances of which an organization is a
member competes against rival networks of alliances.
Collaborative advantage: About managing alliances better than competitors
Types of strategic alliance:
- Equity alliance: creation of a new entity that is owned separately by the partners
involved. (joint venture)
- Non-Equity alliance: based on contracts (franchising, licensing
Motives:
- Scale alliances
- Access alliances
- Complementary alliances: A form of access alliances, but involve organizations at
similar points in the value network combining their distinctive resources so that they
bolster each partners gaps or weaknesses.
- Collusive: Secretly organizations collude together to increase market power. (illegal)
Processes:
- Courtship: Courting potential partners
- Negotiation
- Start up
- Maintenance
- Termination: Sale/divorce, amicable separation, or extension

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Chapter 11: Evaluating Strategies

Three key evaluation criteria: SAFe: Suitability, Acceptability, Feasibility
Suitability: Does a proposed strategy address the key opportunities and constraints an
organization faces?
Acceptability: Does a proposed strategy meet the expectations of stakeholders? Is the level of
risk acceptable? Is the likely return acceptable? Will stakeholders accept the strategy?
Feasibility: Would a proposed strategy work in practice? Can the strategy be financed? Do
people and their skills exist or can they be obtained? Can the required resources be obtained
and integrated?
Suitability: Concerned with assessing which proposed strategies address the key
opportunities and constraints an organization faces.
Acceptability: Whether the expected performance outcomes of a proposed strategy meet the
expectations of stakeholders
- Risk: concerns the extent to which the outcomes of a strategy can be predicted
Sensitivity analysis, financial ratios, break-even analysis
- Return: the financial benefits the stakeholders are expected to receive
Financial analysis, Shareholder value analysis, cost-benefit
- Stakeholder reactions
Owners, bankers, regulators, employees, the local community, customers
Feasibility: Concerned with whether a strategy could work in practice
- Financial
- People and skills
- Resource integration
Evaluation criteria: Four qualifications
- Conflicting conclusions and management judgment
- Consistency between the different elements of strategy
- The implementation and development of strategies
- Strategy development in practice

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Chapter 12: Strategy development processes

Intended strategy development: Deliberately formulated or planned by managers
Strategic leadership vision and command
- Strategic leadership as command
- Strategic leadership as vision
- Strategic leadership as decision-making
- Strategic leadership as symbolic
Strategic planning: systematized, step-by-step, procedures to develop an organizations
strategy
Externally imposed strategies: managers face what they see as the imposition of strategy by
powerful external stakeholders.
Emergent strategy development: Strategies emerge on the basis of a series of decisions, a
pattern in which becomes clear over time
Logical incrementalism: the development of strategy by experimentation and learning
Political processes: strategies develop as the outcome of bargaining and negotiation amon
powerful interest groups
Prior decisions
Organizational systems
Managing strategy development
Multiple processes
Organizational ambidextery: In some organizations there may be a need for both
exploitation and exploration
Different contexts
Managing intended and emergent strategy

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Chapter 13: Organizing for success

Structure: give people formally defined roles, responsibilities and lines of reporting with
regard to strategy.
Functional: divides responsibilities according to the organizations primary specialist roles
such as production, research and sales.
Multidivisional: built op of separate divisions on the basis of products, services or
geographical areas
Matrix: combines different structural dimensions simultaneously, for example product
divisions and geographical territories or product divisions and functional specialisms
Multinational/Transnational

International divisions: Stand-alone division added alongside the structure of the

main home-based business
Local subsidiaries: Have the most of the functions required to operate on their own in
their particular local market.
Global product divisions: Often used where economies of scale are very important.
Transnational corporations: combines local responsiveness with high global
coordination
Project-based: where teams are created, undertake the work and are then dissolved.

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Systems: Support and control people as they carry out structurally defined roles and
responsibilities.
Types of control systems:

Direct supervision: the direct control of strategic decisions by one or a few individuals,
typically focused on the effort put into the business by employees.
Cultural systems: aim to standardize norms of behavior within an organization in line with
particular objectives. (recruitment, socialization, reward)
Performance targets: focus on the outputs of an organization, such as product quality,
revenues or profits. (balance scorecards: set performance targets according to a range of
perspectives, not only financial. strategy maps: link different performance targets into a
mutually supportive causal chain supporting strategic objectives.)
Market systems: involve some formalized system of contracting for resources or inputs
from other parts of an organization and for supplying outputs to other parts of an organization.
Planning systems: plan and control the allocation of resources and monitor their utilization.
- Strategic planning style
- Strategic control
- Financial control
Configurations: The set of organizational design elements that interlink together in order to
support the intended strategy.
McKinsey 7-S framework: highlights the importance of fit between strategy, structure,
systems, staff, style, skills and super ordinate goals.

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Chapter 14: Leadership and strategic change

Diagnosing the change context
Types of change:
- Adaption: change that can be accommodated within the current culture and occur
incrementally
- Evolution: change in strategy that requires culture change, but over time.
- Reconstruction: change that may be rapid and involve a good deal of upheaval in an
organization, but which does not fundamentally change the culture.
- Revolution: change that requires rapid and major strategic as well as culture change
Context of change:
- Time
- Scope: how much change in required
- Preservation: what organizational resources and characteristics need to be maintained
- Diversity: how homogeneous are the staff groups and divisions within the organization
- Capability: managerial and personal capability to implement change
- Capacity: degree of change resource available
- Readiness: is there a felt need for change across the organization
- Power
Forcefield analysis: provides an initial view of change problems that need to be tackled by
indentifying forces for and against change
Leading and managing strategic change
Strategic leadership: the process of influencing an organization (or group within an
organization) in its effort towards achieving an aim or goal.
- Envisioning future strategy
- Aligning
- Embodying change
Situational leadership: successful strategic leaders are able to adjust their style of leadership
to the context they face
Theory E and Theory O:
Theory E: is change based on the pursuit of economic value and it typically associated
with the top-down, programmatic use of the hard levers of change.
Theory O: change based on the development of organizational capability. The emphasis is on
cultural change, learning and participation in change programmes and experimentation.

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Styles of strategic leadership

- Education: persuading others of the need for and means of strategic change
- Collaboration: involvement of those affected by strategic change in setting the change
agenda
- Participation: retains the coordination of and authority over processes of change by a
strategic leader who delegates elements of the change process
- Direction: involves the use of personal managerial authority to establish a clear
strategy and how change will occur.
- Coercion: The imposition of change or the issuing of edicts about change
Levers for managing strategic change
- A compelling case for change (convincing)
- Challenging the taken-for-granted
- Changing operational processes and routines
- Symbolic changes
- Power and political systems
- Change tactics: timing,
Managing strategic change programs
Turnaround strategy: emphasis is on speed of change and rapid cost reduction and/or
revenue generation
Revolutionary change
Evolutionary change

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Chapter 15: The practice of strategy

The strategists
- Top managers and directors
Chief executive officer: responsible for all strategic decisions
Top management team: often an organizations executive directors, share
responsibility for strategy.
Non-executive directors: have no executive management responsibility and in
theory should be able to offer an external and objective view on strategy.
- Strategic planners: managers with a formal responsibility for coordinating the strategy
process
- Middle managers
- Strategy consultants
The paradox of strategy inclusion is that those with the most access to the CEO on strategy
are often strategic planners and strategy consultants who have little responsibility for
strategy implementation and little knowledge of business on the ground.
Strategizing activities
- Strategy analysis
- Strategic issue-selling: process of gaining the attention and support of top management
and other important stakeholders for strategic issues.
- Strategic decision-making
- Communicating the strategy
Strategizing methodologies
- Strategy workshops: involve groups of executives working intensively for one or two
days, often away from office, on organizational strategy.
- Strategy projects: involve teams of people assigned to work on particular strategic
issues over a defined period of time
- Hypothesis testing: a methodology used particularly in strategy projects for setting
priorities in investigating issues and options.
- Business cases: provides data and argument in support of a particular strategy
proposal, e.g. investment in new equipment
- Strategic plans: provides the data and argument in support of a strategy for the whole
organization

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