The fundamental challenge facing business leaders is to drive performance into the future—the dynamics of strategy. To tackle this effectively, they need a clear understanding of what causes performance to improve or deteriorate and what power they have to change this trajectory for the better. Without this understanding, they risk making poor choices about their future—failing to exploit promising opportunities, pursuing unachievable aims, or falling victim to competitive and other threats. Building Strategy and Performance Through Time sets the agenda for building business strategy in powerful, actionable, and accessible terms. It gives executives clear frameworks for answering three fundamental questions:
• Why is our business performance following its current path? • Where is it going if we carry on as we are? • How can we design a robust strategy to transform this future?
The existing strategy tools most widely used help guide management’s choices about where to compete—which customers to serve, with what products and services, and how to deliver those products and services to those customers effectively and pro? tably. While this choice is important, it is not often changed in any fundamental way; having found a reasonably strong and pro? table position on these issues, few ? rms will, or should, set off in a new direction. But there is still much to be done to deliver that strategy, powerfully and sustainably over time. Many decisions need to be made, continually and holistically, across all functions of the business and adapted as conditions change from month to month and year to year. Pricing, product development, marketing, hiring, service levels, and other decisions cannot be made in isolation but must take into account other choices being made, elsewhere and at different times. Building Strategy and Performance Through Time explains a reliable, practical method, known as strategy dynamics, that creates a living picture of how an enterprise actually works and delivers performance. This picture shows exactly where the levers are that management controls and how to choose what to do, when, and how much, to accomplish your speci? c goals. It shows, too, how the same approach can be used to defeat competitors, cope with other outside forces, and keep delivering performance.
Keywords
Strategic management, business strategy, strategy implementation, competitive strategy, strategy dynamics, business model