Strategy and Resilience

Chapter 2

A New Understanding and Approach to Strategy

Strategy is to the business world as to what reflective thinking is to human beings. They are both necessary in order to sustain healthy growth.

What does business strategy mean? And why is it important? Hal Brands, an assistant professor of public policy and history at Duke University, introduces the term strategy to begin his review in The Wall Street Journal of the book entitled, The Strategist. Mr. Brands contends:

“Strategy is where vision and action come together.”1

Mr. Brands attempts to shed light on his claim about strategy by stating:

Yet it also requires an ability to translate that vision into the concrete, day-to-day initiatives that move the ship of state progressively closer to its destination. Strategy is therefore about implementation no less than conception. It is operational as well as aspirational.2

Mr. Brands’ comments disclose the critical role that strategy plays with a vision, a mission, and the operations. But an appeal to the critical role that strategy plays merely gestures to rather than defines what it means. Thus Mr. Brands’ claim appears more as a platitude. He does not inform us of what strategy really means. And Mr. Brands does not clearly tell us why it matters. What we need is to have a clearer as well as a coherent account by offering a definition of business strategy.

Many people refer to Michael E. Porter, Ph.D., in their attempt to learn a definition of business strategy. In his Harvard Business Review article entitled, What is Strategy?, Michael Porter claims:

“Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set activities.”3

George S. Day, Ph.D., Department of Marketing at the Wharton School, supports and expands Michael Porter’s definition of strategy. George Day says:

“Strategy is about seeking a competitive edge over rivals while slowing the erosion of present advantages.”4

Professor Porter and Professor Day define business strategy as the creation as well as the sustainment of a competitive advantage. We hold Professor Porter in high esteem for the contributions in research and analysis that he has made in the fields of economics, management, and competitiveness. And we are grateful to him for offering a framework to help one to evaluate a business strategy. However, the definitions that both Professor Porter and Professor Day propose are vague. More to the point, their definitions fail to do the job.

On the one hand, their definitions lack what it takes to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions of a conceptual definition of business strategy. There are three problems associated with their vague definition. First, it is not clear how business strategy is different from other types of strategy. Upon further review, one will find that competitive advantage applies to the military field as well as to the political realm, too.

This leads us to a second problem. It is not even clear that it does not apply to the game of chess. The points in problems one and two reveal that Porter and Day’s definitions do not successfully mark off these distinctions. Just what in particular do we hold on to that will help us to know the differences? What do you look for in order to know you have a business strategy? They do not offer anything that will help us to grasp its meaning as well as to make the distinctions.

Third, a company may have a business strategy even if they do not possess a competitive advantage. It follows that the claims both Porter and Day propose are not essential to a conceptual definition of a business strategy. Competitive advantage is not a part of what a business strategy means.

On the other hand, what both Professor Porter and Professor Day do offer is a criterion for evaluating whether or not a business strategy is strong or weak. They appeal to competitive advantage as the standard that one ought to use to assess the strength or weakness of a company’s business strategy. But their method is handicapped. One cannot consider a standard until one knows to what the standard is supposed to apply. A conceptual definition is what helps one to determine whether or not a company has a business strategy in the first place.

A strong business strategy is the effect, not the cause, of having the components of a business strategy in the first place. And a competitive advantage is the by-product, not the cause, of a business strategy. Therefore, we still lack a conceptual definition that will help us to capture what is the meaning of a business strategy.

We define a business strategy, for the purpose of our inquiry, as:

A tentative solution to a problem in the attainment as well as the sustainment of the healthy growth of a company; that is, given that the immediate and the emerging conditions ground it as well as warrant it in the marketplace.

This is how we define business strategy. And this definition is what we mean by the concept of a business strategy. However, we do present a conception of a business strategy in order to help us to unpack our definition.

It is useful to see a conception as a narrative. It discloses as well as weaves the salient set of components or characteristic features that account for the structure of a concept. To put it more precisely, it is what makes up a concept. Hence, a conception lays out the defining marks of what we say about a business strategy. It enables one to identify a business strategy as well as to grasp its meaning.

In this inquiry, we present seven components that we consider to be necessary to our conception. The seven components do not function as separate parts cobbled together. Rather, each component is a necessary condition in order to have a business strategy in the first place.