Insights by Stanford Business, January 15, 2021
by Theodore Kinni
iStock/BeholdingEye
There is no shortage of advice regarding the art and craft of business strategy. Yet, in 2019, when the consulting firm Strategy& surveyed 6,000 executives, only 37% said their companies had well-defined strategies and only 35% believed that their strategies would lead to success.
Stanford Graduate School of Business professors Jesper Sørensen and Glenn Carroll peg this lack of confidence in the ability to make sound strategy to a dearth of critical analytical thinking. They find that the strategies that have driven the long-term success of companies such as Apple, Disney, Honda, Southwest Airlines, and Walmart are typically — and insufficiently — attributed to either an innovative vision or the fortuitous discovery of emerging opportunities. In their new book, Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage, they assert that neither explanation tells the whole story.
“To put it bluntly: Without reasoned analysis, neither vision nor discovery will lead to strategic success,” Sørensen and Carroll write. In their book, which grew out of developing and teaching strategy and organizational design courses at Stanford GSB, Sørensen and Carroll apply the logician’s tools to the creation of successful corporate strategy.
The Importance of Rigorous Logic
Executives need the tools of logic to construct a coherent and valid strategy argument, which Sørensen and Carroll identify as the common core in all successful strategies. They define a strategy argument as “an articulation of how a firm’s resources and activities combine with external conditions to allow it to create and capture value.”
There is no shortage of advice regarding the art and craft of business strategy. Yet, in 2019, when the consulting firm Strategy& surveyed 6,000 executives, only 37% said their companies had well-defined strategies and only 35% believed that their strategies would lead to success.
Stanford Graduate School of Business professors Jesper Sørensen and Glenn Carroll peg this lack of confidence in the ability to make sound strategy to a dearth of critical analytical thinking. They find that the strategies that have driven the long-term success of companies such as Apple, Disney, Honda, Southwest Airlines, and Walmart are typically — and insufficiently — attributed to either an innovative vision or the fortuitous discovery of emerging opportunities. In their new book, Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage, they assert that neither explanation tells the whole story.
“To put it bluntly: Without reasoned analysis, neither vision nor discovery will lead to strategic success,” Sørensen and Carroll write. In their book, which grew out of developing and teaching strategy and organizational design courses at Stanford GSB, Sørensen and Carroll apply the logician’s tools to the creation of successful corporate strategy.
The Importance of Rigorous Logic
Executives need the tools of logic to construct a coherent and valid strategy argument, which Sørensen and Carroll identify as the common core in all successful strategies. They define a strategy argument as “an articulation of how a firm’s resources and activities combine with external conditions to allow it to create and capture value.”
“We tend to venerate and celebrate strategic intuition, but intuition can always be wrong,” explains Sørensen. “Leaders need to buffer themselves against that possibility by being rigorously logical, too. Logic also is easier to communicate accurately than vision. If I articulate a grand vision for the future, you may be inspired by it, but how will you act on it?”
“There’s a distinction between talent and a skill,” adds Carroll. “Steve Jobs had a talent for envisioning the future that can’t be taught. But the skills needed to develop a logical argument that will reveal if the strategy being envisioned has holes in it or is missing things that you haven’t thought about — those skills can be taught.” Read the rest here...
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