In this Harvard Business Press article, the co-authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy book, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne explain the importance of alignment across the three strategy propositions of value, profit and people propositions, regardless of an executive's strategic approach to strategy. In choosing which of the two is most appropriate for your organization, you need to consider environmental attractiveness, the capabilities and resources you can call on, and whether your organization has a strategic orientation for competing or for innovating. Whichever type of strategy is chosen, success will depend on creating an aligned set of strategy propositions targeted at three different sets of stakeholders: buyers, shareholders, and the people working for or with the organization. This article builds on the concept of value innovation, the concept of being able to increase value while reducing costs at the same time. This article was referenced by Paul E. Kmen in his paper on how companies can break the trade-off between improving the sustainability in their offerings versus the higher costs associated with becoming a truly social responsible company. The paper illustrates how becoming environmental-friendly can actually lower the production costs by reducing the inputs used. By not taking the structure of the operating environment as a given, a company may generate additional revenues from better products and create new businesses by taking a reconstructionist approach to strategy.
This article argues that there are two types of strategy: structuralist strategies that assume that the operating environment is given and reconstructionist strategies that seek to shape the environment. Structuralist strategies require that the three propositions -- the value, the profit, and the people propositions -- focus on delivering either low cost or differentiation.