{"id":10760,"date":"2011-08-19T08:32:51","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T12:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10760"},"modified":"2011-08-19T08:32:51","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T12:32:51","slug":"defining-a-business-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/19\/defining-a-business-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining a business strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2011-08-19\/want-to-be-like-apple-lose-the-bafflegab-commentary-by-virginia-postrel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> looks at the concept of &#8220;business strategy&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is \u201cDilbert\u201c-fodder that generates cynicism and contempt. It is, at best, a big waste of time.<\/p>\n<p>Neither is strategy a declaration that the ABC Co. will increase sales by 20 percent a year for the next five years, with a profit margin of at least 20 percent. Strategy is not the resolve to hunker down and try harder &mdash; what Kenichi Ohmae of McKinsey criticized in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article as \u201cdo more better.\u201d Effort is not strategy. Neither are financial projections. And neither are wishes.<\/p>\n<p>A strategy \u201cis a way of dealing with a high-stakes challenge,\u201d Rumelt told me in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s a way around the obstacles or problems in a difficult situation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Every good strategy, he writes, includes what he calls the kernel: a \u201cdiagnosis\u201d of the challenge (\u201cWhat\u2019s going on here?\u201d), a \u201cguiding policy\u201d for dealing with that challenge (the core idea often called a strategy), and a set of \u201ccoherent actions\u201d to carry out that policy (the implementation). <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virginia Postrel looks at the concept of &#8220;business strategy&#8221;: Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is \u201cDilbert\u201c-fodder [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[484,409,86],"class_list":["post-10760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-randomness","tag-competition","tag-corporations","tag-criticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Ny","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10761,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10760\/revisions\/10761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}