Abstract
As Richard Rumelt indicates in his book, “Fundamental Issues in Strategy: A Research Agenda”, corporate strategy is a relatively recent discipline. While pioneers in the field like B.H. Liddell Hart and Bruce Henderson (later to found the Boston Consulting Group and creator of the famous BCG Growth-Share Matrix) began their research during the Second World War, the modern field of business strategy as an academic discipline, taught in schools and colleges of business emerged rather later. Rumelt provides an interesting chronicle in the introduction to his volume by noting that historically corporate strategy, even when taught as a capstone course, was not really an organized discipline. Typically, depending on the school’s location and resources, the course would either be taught by the senior most professor in the department or by an outside lecturer from industry. The agenda tended to be very much instructor specific and idiosyncratic rather than drawing in any systematized fashion upon the subject matter of an organized discipline.
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References
Kenneth T. Andrews, “The Concept of Corporate Strategy”, Richard Irwin, Inc, (New York: 1980)
See “Readings in the Strategy Process”, Ed. Henry Mintzberg, Prentice Hall, (New Jersey: 1998) and “The Concept of Corporate Strategy (I Don’t Know What This Means)”, Careertapes Enterprises, 1991.
Ibid. No. 6, “Corporate strategy is the pattern of decisions in a company that determines and reveals its objectives, purposes or goals, produces the principal policies and plans for achieving those goals, and defines the business the company is to pursue, the kind of economic and human organization it intends to be and the nature of the economic and noneconomic contribution it intends to make to its shareholders, employees, customers and communities...”
See, Henry Mintzberg, “The Design School: Reconsidering the Basic Premises of Strategic Management.” (Strategic Management Journal, vol. 11/3, 1990, 171–195). For a grand summation of Mintzberg’s views, see “The Academy of Management Executive”, August 2000 vl4 i3 p31, View from the top: Henry Mintzberg on strategy and management. (Interview) Daniel J. McCarthy.
See, Michael Porter, “What is Strategy”, Harvard Business Review, November-December, 1996.
See for example, “Beyond capitalism” an interview with management expert and author Peter Drucker, by Nathan Gardels, New Perspectives Quarterly, Spring 1998 vl5 i2 p4(9), see also ‘Flashes of genius:’ Peter Drucker on entrepreneurial complacency and delusions .... and the madness of always thinking you’re number one.” Inc. (Special Issue: The State of Small Business), Interview by George Gendron, May 15, 1996vl8n7 p30(8)
Richard Rumelt, “Evaluating Business Strategy”, in Readings in the Strategy Process, Ed. Henry Mintzberg, Prentice Hall, (New Jersey: 1998)
The most lucid explanation of this process is probably given in “The Search for Value: Measuring the Company’s Cost of Capital”, by Michael C. Ehrhardt, Harvard Business School Press, 1994.
Ibid. No. 12
Ibid.
Ibid.
Gordon Donaldson “Financial Goals and Strategic Consequences”, Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1985.
Ibid.
“Strategy and the New Economics of Information”, Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster, Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1997.
Porter treats the subject in a variety of fashions, most notably in his articles for the Harvard Business Review “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” (1980), The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1989), “Capital Disadvantage: America’s Failing Capital Investment System” and “What is Strategy” (1996).
See Slater, Stanley F., and Olson Eric M., “A Fresh Look and Industry and Market Analysis”, Business Horizons, January-February, 2002 for an analysis of the ways in which Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model (Porter, 1979) can be modified to reflect subsequent globalization and the evolution of technology in which they develop an ”augmented model for market analysis“ (pp. 15–16) In particular, they incorporate the additional features of “complementary competition” and “complementers”, as well as “composite competition”, “customers”, “market growth” and “market turbulence”.
Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, “The Core Competence of the Corporation”, Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1990.
In a similar vein to No. 29, above, An article from “Fast Company” (Issue 49, August 2001, pp. 108 ff.) by Jennifer Reingold, entitled “Can C.K. Prahalad Still Pass the Test?”, explores some of the ways in which Prahalad has adapted the strategies based around the concept of core competence (which he and Gary Hamel developed in the 1980’s and 1990’s) for the 21st century. In particular, Prahalad explains that his newer approach is based around universal inter-connectivity and breaking the mold of the print driven society. In describing his new approach, for which he has drawn on the Sanskrit word “Praja” meaning “the assembly” or “the common people” (alternatively, “the people in common“), he argues that the mass availability of data and the ability of consumers to personalize their experience over the internet is a fundamental driver of changes so profound that he calls them “cosmic” (with reference to their paradigmatic scope“).
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, also Kauffman, S. and Macready, W. “Technological Evolution and Adaptive Organizations, Complexity, Vol. 1, No. 2, 26–43
See Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro,“Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy” (Harvard Business School Press, 1998)
Michael R. Lissack, “Chaos and Complexity-What does that have to do with management?”, Working Papers, Henley Management College, U.K. (2000)
Ibid. No. 26
See, Fellman, Post, Wright and Dasari, “Adaptation and Coevolution on an Emergent Global Competitive Landscape”, Inter Journal Complex Systems, 1001, 2004; Mertz, Groothuis and Fellman, “Dynamic Modeling of New Technology Succession: Projecting the Impact of Macro Events and Micro Behaviors on Software Market Cycles“ Inter Journal Complex Systems, 1702,2006; and Mertz, Fellman, Groothuis and Wright, “Multi-Agent Systems Modeling of Technology Succession with Short Cycles”, On-line proceedings of the7th International Conference on Complex Systems, http://necsi.org/events/iccs7/viewpaper.php?id=41
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Fellman, P.V. (2010). Corporate Strategy an Evolutionary Review. In: Minai, A., Braha, D., Bar-Yam, Y. (eds) Unifying Themes in Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85081-6_18
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