Samenvatting "Strategic Managment", 3e bach

Strategic Management
2022 – 2023




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,Lecture 1: What is Strategy?
1 What is strategy?
 We see that a strategy has many definitions:
 “A plan that is intended to achieve a particular purpose.”
o (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
 “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before
defeat.”
o Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
 “Strategy decides where to act; logistics brings the troops to this point; grand tactics decides the manner
of execution and the employment of the troops.”
o Antoine-Henri Jomini (The Art of War)
 “Tolstoy showed [Napoleon] pretending to be the master of events over which in practice he had no
control… issuing orders of greater precision too far from the battlefield to make a difference.”
o Lawrence Friedman (Strategy)
 ‘..the long-term direction of an organization’
o Exploring 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.”
o Alfred D. Chandler (1962)
 “Strategy consists of the unique set of strategically significant processes and the handful of simple rules
that guide them.”
o Eisenhardt and Sull (2001)
 “The pattern or plan that integrates an organization’s major goals, policies, and action sequences into a
cohesive whole. A well formulated strategy helps to marshal and allocate an organization’s resources into
a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated
changes in the environment , and contingent moves by intelligent opponents.”
o James Quinn (1980)
 “Strategy is the result of choices executives make, on where to play and how to win, to maximize long-
term value.”
o Favaro, Ragan, and Hirsh (2012)
 ‘Strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a
unique mix of value’
o Porter (1996)
 ‘..a pattern in a stream of decisions’
o Henry Mintzberg (1979)




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,1.1 The strategy lenses summary




1.2 Mintzberg: Strategy as an Emergent Process
 Mintzberg’s Critique of Formal Strategic Planning:
o The fallacy (misvatting) of prediction
 The future is unknown
 Accidental discoveries and happenstances can have dramatic effects on strategic
direction
o The fallacy of detachment
 impossible to divorce formulation from implementation
o The fallacy of formalization
 inhibits flexibility, spontaneity, intuition and learning
 Strategy evolves through autonomous action

 Strategy evolves through autonomous action, a Pattern in a Stream of Decisions.
o Honda entering U.S. motorcycle market in 1960s and 70s: “…had no strategy other than the idea
of seeing if we could sell something in the United States.”




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, 1.3 Eisenhardt: Strategy as simple rules
1.3.1 General
 Criticism of design and positioning schools, using the internet space as example:
o Intense rivalry
o Instant imitation
o WTP (willingness to pay) is extremely low
o Few barriers to entry
 How did companies like Yahoo! succeed?


1.3.2 Strategy
 One interviewed manager defined strategy as: “I have one thousand opportunities a day; strategy is
deciding which 50 to do.” (Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001: 108)
 Strategy is then the craft of knowing which fleeting opportunities to seize.


1.3.3 How? By doing 2 things
 By identifying a small number of strategically significant processes
 By crafting a few simple rules to guide them.


1.3.4 The rules




1.3.5 Where do the rules come from?
 Own experience (i.e. successes and failures) (Yahoo!)
 Imported experience of management (Akamai)
 Rules exist is some implicit form (Ebay)




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