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This book is intended to find the essence of "strategy". Humans have developed strategic thinking for various purposes, such as politics, war, economy, social development, and etc.... However, our understanding of strategy's nature is still vague and incoherent. Thus, the author of this book decided to explore "strategy" and wrote down what he had fund during the exploration.
This package includes a physical copy of Exploring Strategy text only 10th edition as well as access to the eText and MyStrategyLab. With over one million copies sold worldwide, Exploring Strategy has long been the essential introduction to strategy for the managers of today and tomorrow. From entrepreneurial start-ups to multinationals, charities to government agencies, this book raises the big questions about organisations - how they grow, how they innovate and how they change. With two new members added to the renowned author team, this tenth edition of Exploring Strategy has been comprehensively updated to help you: - Understand clearly the key concepts and tools of strategic management - Explore hot topics, including internationalisation, corporate governance, innovation and entrepreneurship - Learn from case studies on world-famous organisations such as Apple, H&M, Ryanair and Manchester United FC.
You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.
“Shows how humans have brought us to the brink and how humanity can find solutions. I urge people to read with humility and the daring to act.” —Harpal Singh, former Chair, Save the Children, India, and former Vice Chair, Save the Children International In conversations with people all over the world, from government officials and business leaders to taxi drivers and schoolteachers, Blair Sheppard, global leader for strategy and leadership at PwC, discovered they all had surprisingly similar concerns. In this prescient and pragmatic book, he and his team sum up these concerns in what they call the ADAPT framework: Asymmetry of wealth; Disruption wrought by the unexpected and often problematic consequences of technology; Age disparities--stresses caused by very young or very old populations in developed and emerging countries; Polarization as a symptom of the breakdown in global and national consensus; and loss of Trust in the institutions that underpin and stabilize society. These concerns are in turn precipitating four crises: a crisis of prosperity, a crisis of technology, a crisis of institutional legitimacy, and a crisis of leadership. Sheppard and his team analyze the complex roots of these crises--but they also offer solutions, albeit often seemingly counterintuitive ones. For example, in an era of globalization, we need to place a much greater emphasis on developing self-sustaining local economies. And as technology permeates our lives, we need computer scientists and engineers conversant with sociology and psychology and poets who can code. The authors argue persuasively that we have only a decade to make headway on these problems. But if we tackle them now, thoughtfully, imaginatively, creatively, and energetically, in ten years we could be looking at a dawn instead of darkness.
In discussions of firm strategy, proactivity is often mentioned as an enabler of effective goal accomplishment and high performance. However, it is rarely explained what, more precisely, being more proactive actually entails, or even indeed defined what is meant by the term ‘proactivity’ in this particular context. This dissertation seeks to investigate proactivity and its role in shaping firms’ market strategies. From prior research on proactivity in the strategic marketing domain, we know that proactive firms, on average, develop more radical innovation, are better at managing complex and highly competitive environments, and seem to achieve higher business performance. However, few, if any, of these prior studies properly define proactivity and take a more holistic perspective on its impact on firms’ market strategies. In this dissertation I propose a definition of proactivity through three main proactive characteristics: being future-oriented, taking the initiative, and driving change. Thus, a proactive firm does not wait for things to happen and then react to those events. Instead, it keeps a long-term horizon on its scanning for market intelligence and takes action before things happen, in order to create the change needed to improve its situation. While certainly not all proactive actions are successes, particularly not if the firm lacks proper awareness of the situation or exceeds its capabilities in its striving to shape events, proactive firms do have access to a broader set of opportunities than their less proactive competitors. To understand how proactivity influences market strategies, it is first necessary to understand market strategy itself a bit closer. I define market strategies as firms’ strategies for creating customer value. According to the market orientation literature, the basis of achieving long-term high firm performance is to consistently provide customers with superior value to that of the competition. Thus, firms’ market strategies are squarely at the center of their efforts to become more successful. To study these strategies and the effects they have, it is necessary to go beyond strategy documents and study the actual activities that firms perform to implement them. A market strategy, in my conceptualization, can thus be perceived as a coherent set of activities aimed at fulfilling certain goals, leading to the creation of customer value. These activities can then be further categorized according to the strategic orientations that drive the firm’s strategy-making, with customer orientation, competition orientation and innovation orientation being the orientations that have the most impact on market strategies. From this conceptual foundation, the dissertation takes four different approaches to investigating proactive market strategies, each presented in one of the four appended papers. In the first paper, a conceptual typology of different types of market strategies based on different value-creation logics – which are the combinations of responsiveness and proactivity that influence a firm’s value-creation efforts – is presented. In the second paper, the market strategies of five proactive firms are investigated to find three generic proactive market strategies, each representing a typical way for firms to employ proactivity in their market strategies. The third paper uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the configurations of proactivity, market environment and different market strategies that consistently lead to high market-strategic effectiveness. Finally, the fourth paper goes more in-depth in exploring the activities that firms employ to create value for customers, with particular focus on the different activities that are performed during different stages of contact with a customer. Through this thorough investigation of proactive market strategies, this dissertation presents a holistic view of proactivity and its impact on firms’ market strategies and their associated activities. As this is the first proper holistic view of proactivity in market strategy and also the first attempt to properly define proactivity in the market-strategic context, the dissertation also provides directions for future research. ”Vi måste vara mer proaktiva” är en fras som säkerligen har dragits på många strategimöten. I såväl internationaliserade jättar som lokala småföretag, tjänsteföretag likväl som tillverkande industrier, har det i styrelserum, ledningsmöten, pratats om behovet att vara mer proaktiv. Det uppenbara är att proaktivitet ses som något positivt, något som kan hjälpa företaget bli bättre, mer konkurrenskraftigt, och så vidare. Men vad menar man egentligen med att vara proaktiv i det här sammanhanget? Och hur påverkar det egentligen företags prestationsförmåga? Harald Brege vid Linköpings Universitet har studerat proaktivitet och hur företag kan använda det för att öka effektiviteten på sina marknadsstrategier, d.v.s. deras strategier för att skapa kundvärde. Proaktivitet är en nyckel som kan låsa upp möjligheter för företag att bli bättre på att hantera en föränderlig och komplex omvärld och stärka sin konkurrenskraft. Slår man upp ordet ”proaktiv” i SAOL får man veta att det betyder förebyggande eller förutseende, men för att kunna användas som ett verktyg för strategiutveckling behövs en mer användbar definition än så. Ur ett strategiskt perspektiv så har proaktivitet tre huvudsakliga komponenter: att vara långsiktig, att ta initiativet och att driva förändring. Det viktigaste för ett proaktivt företag är att inte vara passiva och vänta på att något händer som tvingar dem till förändring eller att bara reaktivt agera på det som finns i omvärlden. Istället så blickar man framåt, identifierar de potentiella sätt som en situation kan utvecklas på och tar sedan initiativet och agerar för att förändra situationen så att den passar företaget bättre. Dock så räcker det inte bara att bli proaktiv och så får man stora vinster på direkten. För att proaktiviteten ska bli framgångsrik så måste ett företag dels arbeta för att skaffa en grundlig förståelse av sin omgivning, dels se till de olika delarna i deras marknadsstrategi hänger ihop och arbetar mot samma mål. Är strategin otydlig eller om företaget håller på med saker de inte har insikt i så är proaktivitet istället sannolikt att ge dåliga resultat. Genom att arbeta för att förstå sina kunder på djupet så kan proaktiva företag snabbt komma med lösningar till behov, inklusive behov som kanske inte ens kunderna själva hade identifierat. Genom att aktivt arbeta med att förändra kunders uppfattning av vad en leverantör ska göra för dem och att påverka politiker och andra intressenter så kan proaktiva företag forma sina marknader för att bättre passa dem. Genom att driva produktutveckling som fokuserar på morgondagens produkter och att testa nya möjligheter, inte bara småförbättringar av samma gamla produkter, så kan proaktiva företag skapa innovativa nya erbjudanden som vänder upp och ner på marknaden. Dessa tre exempel belyser de tre generiska proaktiva marknadsstrategier som har identifierats: kundengagemang, marknadsformande, och innovationsledarskap.
How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy. The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.
With over one million copies sold worldwide, Exploring Strategy has long been the essential strategy text for managers of today and tomorrow. From entrepreneurial start-ups to multinationals, charities to government agencies, this book raises the big questions about organisations- how they grow, how they innovate and how they change.
At a time of unprecedented healthcare industry turmoil and growing inroads by competitors from CVS to Amazon, hospital CEOs and senior leaders need an innovative, comprehensive approach to strategic thinking. In Patient-Centered Strategy, Jeff Hunter, a leading healthcare strategic planner for more than 40 years, describes a powerful new system for strategy formulation one that derives value from an in depth understanding of patients needs, and unites senior leaders with frontline caregivers in the creative process. He helps you identify your current strategic issues, formulate solutions, and then determine What must be true to solve problems and explore opportunities. Patient-Centered Strategy describes proven techniques on how to test your solutions quickly and then deploy the results effectively throughout your entire organization for sustained transformation. Jeff shows senior executives: How to shed outdated mental models of strategic planning that inhibit creative thinking and behavior How to discover unmet needs, then create unique and meaningful value for customers How to connect with frontline caregivers in the discovery and creative process How to put real strategy back into strategy deployment How to make meaningful choices to reduce institutional overburden How to use scientific problem-solving to create solutions How to conduct small scale experiments that lead to large-scale transformation How to model the learning process to create more value faster How to use visual management and leader standard work to stay aligned and focused Patient-Centered Strategy is also a powerful story of personal change, tracing Jeff s journey from a conventional planner to an innovative practitioner on the cutting edge of 21st century strategic thinking.
