CHAPTER 9
Five Questions to Build a Strategy
by Roger L. Martin
People make strategy much harder than it needs to be. For some, the problem is that they focus too much on the tools: environmental scans, SWOT analyses, customer analyses, competitor analyses, financial modeling, and so on. Other people get into trouble because they think it’s all about the broad, conceptual, future-oriented, big-picture stuff—not to be confused with tactics. Still other times, people think that strategy is what happens when we think about changing directions.
The reality is that strategy is at some level about all those things, and you can’t do a satisfactory job with your analysis alone, or your big picture alone, or your changes alone. You have to do a bit of ...
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