1
Summary Book: Exploring Strategy
R. Whittington, P. Regnér, D. Angwin, G. Johnson, K. Scholes (12e edition) –
Business Strategy and Alignment
CH 1: Introducing Strategy...........................................................................1
CH 2: Macro-environment Analysis..............................................................8
CH 3: Industry and Secor Analysis.............................................................14
CH 4: Resources and Capabilities Analysis.................................................20
CH 5: Stakeholders and Governance..........................................................27
CH 6: History and Culture...........................................................................31
CH 7: Business Strategy and Models..........................................................36
CH 8: Corporate Strategy...........................................................................43
CH 9: International Strategy.......................................................................50
CH 11: Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances...............................................56
CH 12: Evaluating Strategies.....................................................................62
CH 14: Organising and Strategy.................................................................69
CH 15: Leadership and Strategic Change...................................................75
CH 16: The Practice of Strategy.................................................................81
CH 1: Introducing Strategy
Learning outcomes:
, 2
- Summarise the strategy of an organisation in a ‘strategy statement’.
- Distinguish between corporate, business, and functional strategies.
- Identify key issues for an organisation’s strategy using the Exploring
Strategy Framework.
- Understand different people’s roles in strategy work.
- Appreciate the importance of different organisational contexts, academic
disciplines and theoretical lenses to practical strategy analysis.
1.1 Introduction
Strategy’s distinctive features: draws upon many perspectives,
including economics, finance, marketing, operational
management, organisational behaviour, psychology, etc.
Exploring Strategy: is distinctive in emphasising a
comprehensive view of strategy, enables you to explore the
insights of many disciplinary perspectives including the
economics of strategy and the people side of managing
strategy in practice.
1.2 What is Strategy?
Strategy: the long-term direction of an
organisation.
Two advantages:
- The long-term direction of an
organisation can include deliberate, logical strategy and more incremental,
emergent patterns of strategy.
- Long-term direction can include strategies that emphasise difference &
competition, and strategies that recognise the roles of cooperation and
imitation.
Three elements of the strategy definition:
- The long term: the importance of this is
emphasised by the ‘three horizons’ framework:
suggests organisations should think of their
businesses/activities in terms of different
‘horizons’, defined by time. Managers need to
avoid focusing on the short-term issues of their
existing activities.
o Horizon 1: businesses are the current core activities. They need
defending and extending but the expectation is that in the long term
they risk becoming flat or declining in terms of profits (or whatever
else the organisation values).
o Horizon 2: businesses are emerging activities that should provide
new future sources of profits.
, 3
o Horizon 3: these possibilities are more open and for which outcomes
are even more uncertain. Typically risky research and development
projects, start-up ventures, test-market pilots or similar.
- Strategic direction: sometimes only emerges as a coherent pattern over
time. Typically, however, managers and entrepreneurs try to set the
direction of their strategy according to long-erm objectives. Profits do not
always set strategic direction.
o Public-sector/charity organisations may set their strategic direction
according to other objectives.
o In the private sector profit is not always the sole criterion for
strategy. Family businesses.
- Organisation: involve many relationships, internally and externally. Also,
strategy is vitally concerned with an organisation’s external boundaries:
questions about what to include within the organisation and how to
manage important relationship with what is kept outside.
Strategic management: term for strategy as it involves managing people,
relationships and resources.
Core of a strategist’s job: defining and expressing a clear and motivating purpose
for the organisation. The stated purpose should address two questions:
- How does the organisation make a difference?
- For whom does the organisation make the difference?
How organisations define their purpose:
- Mission statement: to provide employees/stakeholders with clarity about
what the organisation is there to do. Two questions that can clarify an
organisation’s business:
o What would be lost if the organisation did not exist?
o How do we make a difference?
- Vision statement: the future the organisation seeks to create. Expresses an
aspiration that will enthuse, gain commitment and stretch performance.
o What do we want to achieve?
- Corporate values: underlying and enduring core ‘principles’ that guide an
organisation’s strategy and define the way that the organisation should
operate.
o Would these values change with circumstance? If yes, then they are
not ‘core’ and not ‘enduring’.
- Objectives: statements or specific outcomes that are to be achieved.
Strategy statement, three main themes: the fundamental goals (mission, vision
or objectives); the scope/domain of the organisation’s activities; the advantages
or capabilities it has to deliver all of these.
- Scope: refers to three dimensions: customers or clients; geographical
location; and extent of internal activities (‘vertical integration’).
, 4
- Advantage: how the organisation will achieve the objectives it has set for
itself in its chosen domain. In competitive environments; competitive
advantage.
Inside the organisation, strategies can exist at three main levels:
- Corporate-level strategy: the overall scope of an organisation and how
value is added to the constituent business of the organisation whole.
Includes geographical scope, diversity of products or services, acquisitions
of new businesses, and how resources are allocated between the different
elements of the organisation.
- Business-level strategy: how the individual businesses should compete in
their markets (‘competitive strategy’). Issues such as innovation,
appropriate scale and response to competitors’ moves. In public sector,
decisions about how units should provide best-value services.
- Functional strategies: how the components of an organisation deliver
effectively the corporate- and business-level strategies in terms of
resources, processes, and people. Depend on decisions that are taken, or
activities that occur, at the functional level.
1.3 The Exploring Strategy Framework
Exploring Strategy Framework: understanding the
strategic position of an organisation; assessing strategic
choices for the future; and managing strategy in action.
Strategic position: the impact on strategy of the
external environment, the organisation’s strategic
resources and capabilities, the organisation’s goals and
the organisation’s culture.
- Strategic purpose: What does it seek to achieve?
- Macro-environment: May present both
opportunities and threats. PESTLE framework, forecasting approaches and
scenario cube assess key drivers of change.
- Industry and sector: Customers and suppliers also present challenges.
Frameworks: Porter’s Five Forces, industry life cycle, strategic groups,
strategy canvas helps focus your analysis on priority issues in the face of
contextual complexity and dynamism.
- Resources and capabilities: Are the organisation’s capabilities adequate to
the challenges of its environment and the demands of its goals?
Frameworks: VRIO, value chain, activity systems and SWOT enables you to
analyse such.
- Stakeholders and governance: The wishes of key stakeholders should
define the purpose of an organisation. The issue of corporate governance
is important: how to ensure that managers stick to the agreed purpose.
Questions of purpose and accountability raise issues of corporate social
responsibility and ethics. Techniques that enable you to identify
stakeholders, assess their relative importance through the use of a
Summary Book: Exploring Strategy
R. Whittington, P. Regnér, D. Angwin, G. Johnson, K. Scholes (12e edition) –
Business Strategy and Alignment
CH 1: Introducing Strategy...........................................................................1
CH 2: Macro-environment Analysis..............................................................8
CH 3: Industry and Secor Analysis.............................................................14
CH 4: Resources and Capabilities Analysis.................................................20
CH 5: Stakeholders and Governance..........................................................27
CH 6: History and Culture...........................................................................31
CH 7: Business Strategy and Models..........................................................36
CH 8: Corporate Strategy...........................................................................43
CH 9: International Strategy.......................................................................50
CH 11: Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances...............................................56
CH 12: Evaluating Strategies.....................................................................62
CH 14: Organising and Strategy.................................................................69
CH 15: Leadership and Strategic Change...................................................75
CH 16: The Practice of Strategy.................................................................81
CH 1: Introducing Strategy
Learning outcomes:
, 2
- Summarise the strategy of an organisation in a ‘strategy statement’.
- Distinguish between corporate, business, and functional strategies.
- Identify key issues for an organisation’s strategy using the Exploring
Strategy Framework.
- Understand different people’s roles in strategy work.
- Appreciate the importance of different organisational contexts, academic
disciplines and theoretical lenses to practical strategy analysis.
1.1 Introduction
Strategy’s distinctive features: draws upon many perspectives,
including economics, finance, marketing, operational
management, organisational behaviour, psychology, etc.
Exploring Strategy: is distinctive in emphasising a
comprehensive view of strategy, enables you to explore the
insights of many disciplinary perspectives including the
economics of strategy and the people side of managing
strategy in practice.
1.2 What is Strategy?
Strategy: the long-term direction of an
organisation.
Two advantages:
- The long-term direction of an
organisation can include deliberate, logical strategy and more incremental,
emergent patterns of strategy.
- Long-term direction can include strategies that emphasise difference &
competition, and strategies that recognise the roles of cooperation and
imitation.
Three elements of the strategy definition:
- The long term: the importance of this is
emphasised by the ‘three horizons’ framework:
suggests organisations should think of their
businesses/activities in terms of different
‘horizons’, defined by time. Managers need to
avoid focusing on the short-term issues of their
existing activities.
o Horizon 1: businesses are the current core activities. They need
defending and extending but the expectation is that in the long term
they risk becoming flat or declining in terms of profits (or whatever
else the organisation values).
o Horizon 2: businesses are emerging activities that should provide
new future sources of profits.
, 3
o Horizon 3: these possibilities are more open and for which outcomes
are even more uncertain. Typically risky research and development
projects, start-up ventures, test-market pilots or similar.
- Strategic direction: sometimes only emerges as a coherent pattern over
time. Typically, however, managers and entrepreneurs try to set the
direction of their strategy according to long-erm objectives. Profits do not
always set strategic direction.
o Public-sector/charity organisations may set their strategic direction
according to other objectives.
o In the private sector profit is not always the sole criterion for
strategy. Family businesses.
- Organisation: involve many relationships, internally and externally. Also,
strategy is vitally concerned with an organisation’s external boundaries:
questions about what to include within the organisation and how to
manage important relationship with what is kept outside.
Strategic management: term for strategy as it involves managing people,
relationships and resources.
Core of a strategist’s job: defining and expressing a clear and motivating purpose
for the organisation. The stated purpose should address two questions:
- How does the organisation make a difference?
- For whom does the organisation make the difference?
How organisations define their purpose:
- Mission statement: to provide employees/stakeholders with clarity about
what the organisation is there to do. Two questions that can clarify an
organisation’s business:
o What would be lost if the organisation did not exist?
o How do we make a difference?
- Vision statement: the future the organisation seeks to create. Expresses an
aspiration that will enthuse, gain commitment and stretch performance.
o What do we want to achieve?
- Corporate values: underlying and enduring core ‘principles’ that guide an
organisation’s strategy and define the way that the organisation should
operate.
o Would these values change with circumstance? If yes, then they are
not ‘core’ and not ‘enduring’.
- Objectives: statements or specific outcomes that are to be achieved.
Strategy statement, three main themes: the fundamental goals (mission, vision
or objectives); the scope/domain of the organisation’s activities; the advantages
or capabilities it has to deliver all of these.
- Scope: refers to three dimensions: customers or clients; geographical
location; and extent of internal activities (‘vertical integration’).
, 4
- Advantage: how the organisation will achieve the objectives it has set for
itself in its chosen domain. In competitive environments; competitive
advantage.
Inside the organisation, strategies can exist at three main levels:
- Corporate-level strategy: the overall scope of an organisation and how
value is added to the constituent business of the organisation whole.
Includes geographical scope, diversity of products or services, acquisitions
of new businesses, and how resources are allocated between the different
elements of the organisation.
- Business-level strategy: how the individual businesses should compete in
their markets (‘competitive strategy’). Issues such as innovation,
appropriate scale and response to competitors’ moves. In public sector,
decisions about how units should provide best-value services.
- Functional strategies: how the components of an organisation deliver
effectively the corporate- and business-level strategies in terms of
resources, processes, and people. Depend on decisions that are taken, or
activities that occur, at the functional level.
1.3 The Exploring Strategy Framework
Exploring Strategy Framework: understanding the
strategic position of an organisation; assessing strategic
choices for the future; and managing strategy in action.
Strategic position: the impact on strategy of the
external environment, the organisation’s strategic
resources and capabilities, the organisation’s goals and
the organisation’s culture.
- Strategic purpose: What does it seek to achieve?
- Macro-environment: May present both
opportunities and threats. PESTLE framework, forecasting approaches and
scenario cube assess key drivers of change.
- Industry and sector: Customers and suppliers also present challenges.
Frameworks: Porter’s Five Forces, industry life cycle, strategic groups,
strategy canvas helps focus your analysis on priority issues in the face of
contextual complexity and dynamism.
- Resources and capabilities: Are the organisation’s capabilities adequate to
the challenges of its environment and the demands of its goals?
Frameworks: VRIO, value chain, activity systems and SWOT enables you to
analyse such.
- Stakeholders and governance: The wishes of key stakeholders should
define the purpose of an organisation. The issue of corporate governance
is important: how to ensure that managers stick to the agreed purpose.
Questions of purpose and accountability raise issues of corporate social
responsibility and ethics. Techniques that enable you to identify
stakeholders, assess their relative importance through the use of a
