Strategic Management from an Islamic Perspective: Text and Cases

Chapter 8

Strategic Decision Making

Introduction

When we started writing this textbook, we made a number of assumptions. One assumption was that there was a “best” model for strategic management. We thought that we could take certain ideas and mix them around. Maybe doing so would require starting with Michael Porter, adding a bit of Gary Hamel, and mixing in some ideas from Henry Mintzberg. We assumed that our critical task (our “value added,” so to speak) would be identifying the components that complied with Islamic principles and eliminating the components that clashed with Islamic principles. All of this would be spiced up by feeling accountable to God.

As our review of the literature progressed, our perception changed. We knew that there was a wide range of opinions about strategy, but when we teach, we tend to focus on a few famous writers and their models. We rarely present to our students the whole range of differences of opinion that exist in the discipline. As our review progressed, the lack of consensus became more and more obvious and more and more intellectually problematic. Sometimes this diversity of opinion is presented as a logical progression in the history of strategic management (Beekun, 2011). But we feel that imposing order on such diverse opinions is misleading. We found Moore (1992) particularly helpful because he starts with the early writers in strategic management. In particular, the following paragraph caught our attention:

One of the first and greatest ...