Are you sure you have a strategy?

PARAGRAPH 1 -What is the issue/problem/opportunity/challenge?

• PARAGRAPH 2 – What is your position on the issue?What do you think?
• PARAGRAPH 3 – What results/impacts (e.g., costs, legal impacts, people factor, etc.) action/inaction?
• PARAGRAPH 4 – Summary and conclusions
  

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The article has shed enormous light on defining the constitution of a “strategy”. It has been argued that over the last 30 years, many frameworks have been developed to analyze situations that need strategic solutions. But there is still a need to define what we want to achieve with strategies or strategic thinking as all these frameworks fail to provide a definite explanation the concept of strategy formulation. The problem with the definition of strategy has been the fact that each person define strategy according to their needs, not as a whole terminology that can have a general definition which is acceptable by the majority of scholars. Executives and managers have divided their work in relation to different strategies that are related to different aspects of the business world. According to the authors, a business should have a unified strategy which could well have different parts.

I generally agree to the argument by the authors according to which there is a lack of consensus on the definition or a definite design of a “strategy”. Having said that, I think that it is a debatable question about if there should be a definite definition of a strategy? Or if should there be definite elements of a strategy, as the authors have provided five. I do not think so. In my opinion, different situations in a business demand for different approached to strategy formulation and modeling. Scholars and business people should be provided with the flexibility to decide what kind of strategic thinking is the demand of the situation and how should they define a situation specific strategy. Scholars should do their research and be able to devise different business strategic model in my opinion. A comparison of the results of each model could be used as a guide when selecting a model to apply to a situation though.

The implications of the suggestions of the article are on two fronts. Firstly, the academic front in which the article has criticized the approach of different scholars to not come to conclusion about the definition of a strategy. I consider it to be a very bold statement as I think that researcher in the business and management filed may not have specific priorities or set guidelines when they define different business and/or academic terms. Therefore, they cannot be blamed for not coming to consensus on any academic topic. In fact, scientific thinking and research suggests results in the presence of credible facts and counter facts, not on the needs of according to the point of view of authorities in the research world. Secondly, the article has also criticized the role of executive while defining strategies related to acquisition, services and other business areas. The authors suggest that these strategies may prioritize tasks and harm the credibility of the executives. I would like to disagree with this suggestions and would like to mention that taking a leading role and formulating different strategies would add credibility to these executives.

The article is a great food for thought which could be utilized by businesses which want to have a holistic approach towards strategies and want to carry on a single whole strategy for their organization instead of different strategies. The five elements of strategy i.e. arenas, vehicles, differentiators, staging and economic logic could be utilized to formulate the holistic strategy. This article also provide opportunity for researchers to research strategy as a unique business field and come up with workable definitions of it.