Whittington for exam

Question: What is strategy?

There is not much agreement about strategy in other textbooks. Rather than taking ‘strategic management’ for granted, this book starts from the basic question ‘what is strategy anyway?’. Four basic conceptions of strategy are introduced which all have different implications for how to go about ‘doing strategy’.

Each perspective has its own view of strategy and how it matters for managerial practice. The Classical approach gives the textbook answers.
- Classicists broadly see strategy as a rational process of long-term planning, vital to securing the future.
- Evolutionists usually regard the future as too volatile and unpredictable to plan for, and warn that the best strategy is to concentrate on maximizing changes of survival today.
- Processualists too doubt the value of rational long-term planning, seeing strategy best as an emergent process of learning and adaptation.
- Systemic theorists take a relativist position, arguing that the forms and goals of strategy-making depend particularly on social context, and that strategy should therefore be undertaken with sociological sensitivity.

These are four starkly different perspectives (p. 119), but it is the Systemic sensibility that helps us finally to choose. For the Systemic strategist, effectiveness depends upon understanding context and playing by local rules. Classical, evolutionary, processual, they can all take place in some conditions. There is no one best way. The key is to match strategy to market, organizational, and social environments. They all work best in different contexts (p. 120).

Strategic management: A set of conceptual frameworks and tools intended to help managers to make decisions on the long run positioning of firms, resulting in an adequate level of performance of the organization (sheet). A way to deal with environment in