Strategy That Works

APPENDIX A

A History of Strategy

The natural state of management has been incoherence. Strategy was not tied to execution in the past, at least not consistently.

The old questions in strategy were, Where are we going to go, and where are we going to grow? But the big current questions are, Who are we going to be, and how are we going to add value? If the latter set of questions represents strategy, then execution is extending that value proposition to market.

The yin and yang of strategic fad and fashion—the treadmill-like movement of business leadership from one trend to another over the past fifty years—has often led companies to make incoherent and ineffective moves. As writer Walter Kiechel notes, this pattern began in the 1960s, when business ...