Strategic Analysis and Choice

Chapter 9

Some Final Thoughts on Practice and Improvisation

Form a conceptual point of view, developing a strategy for your firm is really pretty straightforward. Constantinos Markides¹ argues that a strategic position can be summed up as the responses to three simple questions:

• Who are my customers—and who are not?
• What will I offer customers—and what will I not offer?
• How should I do this in the most efficient way?

You’ll recall that these are basically the same as the founding questions in chapter 7, which dealt with choosing or formulating a strategy for your firm. The questions are simple but turn out to be quite difficult to answer clearly, especially if you have no way to attack them. Developing good analytic techniques is a powerful ...