The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps for Strategy

Drucker P.F. , Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 104.

Moore, in fact, prefers not to associate the word strategy with the word plan per se: “The term plan is much too static for our purposes unless qualified. There is not enough of the idea of scheming or calculation with an end in view in it to satisfy us. Plans are used to build ships. Strategies are used to achieve ends among people. You simply do not deal strategically with inanimate objects.” But Moore certainly supports the characteristics of intentionality. Moore D.G. , “Managerial Strategies,” in Warner W.L. Martin N.H. , eds., Industrial Man: Businessmen and Business Organizations (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1959), pp. 220,226.

Von Clausewitz C. , On War, translated by Howard M. Paret P. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 177.

Von Newmann J. Morgenstern O. , Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 79.

Glueck W.F. , Business Policy and Strategic Management, 3rd Edition (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 9.

Random House Dictionary.

Porter M.E. , Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1980).

Porter M.E. , Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1985).

Schelling T.C. , The Strategy of Conflict, 2nd Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Mintzberg H. , “Research on Strategy-Making,” Proceedings after the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Minneapolis, 1972, pp. 90–94; Mintzberg M. , “Patterns in Strategy Formation,” Management Science, 24/9 (1978):934–948; Mintzberg H. Waters J. A. , “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic Management Journal, 6/3 (1985):257–272.

Evered discusses the Greek origins of the word and traces its entry into contemporary Western vocabulary through the military. Evered R. , “So What Is Strategy,” Long Range Planning, 16/3 (1983):57–72.

As suggested in the results of a questionnaire by Ragab and Paterson; Ragab M. Paterson W.E. , “An Exploratory Study of the Strategy Construct,” Proceedings of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada Conference, 1981. Two notable exceptions are Herbert Simon and Jerome Bruner and his colleagues; Simon H. A. , Administrative Behavior, 2nd Edition (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1957); Bruner J.S. Goodnow J.J. Austin G. A. , A Study of Thinking (New York, NY: Wiley, 1956), pp. 54–55.

Quoted in Quinn J.B. , Strategies for Change: Logical Incrementalism (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, 1980), p. 35.

Business Week, October 31, 1983.

Majone Via G. , “The Uses of Policy Analysis,” in The Future and the Past: Essays on Programs, Russell Sage Foundation Annual Report, 1976–1977, pp. 201–220.

Chandler A.D. , Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 13.

Von Clausewitz , op. cit., p. 128.

Franklin B. , Poor Richard's Almanac (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1977), p. 280.

Rumelt R. P. , “Evaluation of Strategy: Theory and Models,” in Schendel D. E. Hofer C. W. , eds., Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy and Planning (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1979), pp. 196–212.

We might note a similar problem with “policy,” a word whose usage is terrible confused. In the military, the word has traditionally served one notch in the hierarchy above strategy, in business one notch below, and in public administration in general as a substitute. In the military, policy deals with the purposes for which wars are fought, which is supposed to be the responsibility of the politicians. In other words, the politicians make policy, the generals, strategy. But modern warfare has confused this usage (see Summers ), so that today strategy in the military context has somehow come to be associated with the acquisition of nuclear weapons and their use against non-military targets. In business, while “policy” has been the label for the entire field of study of general management (at least until “strategic management” gained currency in the 1970s), its technical use was as a general rule to dictate decisions in a specific case, usually a standard and recurring situation, as in “Our policy is to require long-range forecasts every four months.” Accordingly, management planning theorists, such as George Steiner, describe policies as deriving from strategies although some textbook writers (such as Leontiades, Chang and Campo-Flores, and Peter Drucker) have used the two words in exactly the opposite way, as in the military. This reflects the fact that “policy” was the common word in the management literature before “strategy” replaced it in the 1960s (see, for example, Jamison, and Gross and Gross). But in the public sector today, the words “policy” and “policymaking” correspond roughly to “strategy” and “strategy making.” Summers H. G. , On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1981); Steiner G. A. , Top Management Planning (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1969), p. 264 ff; Leontiades M. , Management Policy, Strategy and Plans (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1982), p. 4; Chang Y.N.A. Compo-Flores F. , Business Policy and Strategy (Goodyear, 1980), p. 7; Drucker , op. cit., p. 104; Jamison C.L. , Business Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1953); Gross A. Gross W. , eds., Business Policy: Selected Readings and Editorial Commentaries (New York, NY: Ronald Press, 1967).

Hofer C.W. Schendel D. , Strategy Formulation: Analytical Concepts (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1978), p. 4.

Bowman E.H. , “Epistomology, Corporate Strategy, and Academe,” Sloan Management Review, 15/2 (1974):47.

Thompson J.D. , Organizations in Action (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

McNichols T.J. , Policy-Making and Executive Action (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 257.

Rumelt , op. cit., p. 4.

Rumelt R. P. , “The Evaluation of Business Strategy,” in Glueck W.F. , Business Policy and Strategic Management, 3rd Edition (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 361.

E.g., Porter , op. cit., (1980, 1985), except for his chapters noted earlier, which tend to have a 2-person competitive focus.

Expressed at the Strategic Management Society Conference, Paris, October 1982.

Astley W.G. Fombrun C.J. , “Collective Strategy: Social Ecology of Organizational Environments,” Academy of Management Review, 8/4 (1983):576–587.

Ibid., p. 577.

Selznick P. , Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 47. A subsequent paper by the author (in process) on the “design school” of strategy formation shows the link of Selznick's early work to the writings of Kenneth Andrews in the Harvard policy textbook. Andrews K.R. , The Concept of Corporate Strategy, Revised Edition (Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987).

Bieri J. , “Cognitive Structures in Personality,” in Schroder H.M. Suedfeld P. , eds., Personality: Theory and Information Processing (New York, NY: Ronald Press, 1971), p. 178. By the same token, Bieri (p. 179) uses the word “strategy” in the context of psychology.

Drucker , op. cit.

Tregoe B.B. Zimmerman J.W. , Top Management Strategy (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1980).

Kuhn T.S. , The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 2nd Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

My own translation of “un reve ou un bouquet de reves en quete de realite.” Lapierre L. , “Le changement strategique: Un reve en quete de reel,” Ph.D. Management Policy course paper, McGill University, Canada, 1980.

Summer , op. cit., p. 18.

Majone G. , op. cit.

Hedberg B. Jonsson S.A. , “Strategy Formulation as a Discontinuous Process,” International Studies of Management and Organization, 7/2 (1977):90.

Tregoe Zimmerman , op. cit., p. 17.

Boston consulting Group, Strategy Alternatives for the British Motorcycle Industry (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1975).

E.g., Ansoff H.I. , Corporate Strategy (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965); Andrews , op. cit.; Steiner , op. cit.; Schendel D.E. Hofer C.H. , eds., Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy and Planning (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1979), p. 15.

Pascale R.T. , “Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Story Behind Honda's Success,” California Management Review, 26/3 (Spring 1984):47–72.

Quinn J.B. , “Honda Motor Company Case,” in Quinn J.B. Mintzberg H. James B.G. , The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988).

Perrow C. , Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970), p. 161.

E.g., Brunsson N. , “The Irrationality of Action and Action Rationality: Decisions, Ideologies, and Organizational Actions,” Journal of Management Studies, 19/1 (1982):29–44.