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1-Page Summary of Strategy Safari

Overview

Competitive Strategy is a book about how to compete in the market. It also shows how companies can use their competitors’ information to best them at their own game.

There are two opposing views on strategy. One is that it’s unnecessary and the other is that sticking to your plan no matter what happens is better than devising a new one.

The good news is that there’s no right or wrong way to think about strategy. The bad news is that it’s not as simple as just having an opinion on it! Strategy has many aspects, because it involves handling stability and change. It can also be about the patterns and perspectives of people who make decisions. This pack presents a crash course in management strategy by covering ten schools of thought so you get a comprehensive overview of the field.

After reading this, you will know the strategy Sun-Tzu uses in The Art of War and how it applies to start-ups. You’ll also learn about a school of thought that combines all these strategies.

Big Idea #1: The first and oldest business school was the design school.

Some schools of management are well known. And although many entrepreneurs aren’t familiar with the term “design school”, its concepts have been widely incorporated into other fields.

Design school is a good strategy for management because it focuses on coming up with ideas, and the SWOT model helps to accomplish that.

The SWOT model is a way to analyze your company’s strengths and weaknesses by taking into account the opportunities and threats in the business environment.

SWOT analysis takes into account the values of a company and its management.

Strategy is important in business. The SWOT model helps you figure out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to create a strategy for your organization.

Designing a strategy too far in advance or with too much distance from the actual implementation can lead to huge failures. This is true of US military strategies during the Vietnam War, which were formulated on the other side of the world and failed because they didn’t take into account conditions on the ground.

Big Idea #2: The school of planning is great for establishing a plan and goals.

The design school first considers the whole strategy before putting it into practice. This is a prescriptive strategy because it defines the actions to be taken.

The planning school aims to divide the SWOT model into defined steps. It starts by analyzing a situation and ends with implementing strategies. This is most often seen in urban planning, system theory, and socialist systems.

The planning school of innovation believes in creating plans to achieve goals. It works like this: first, analyze your situation; second, create a plan to address the situation and reach your goals; third, work out the exact steps you need to take for people in the organization to execute that plan.

Although the planning school has a clear plan of action, it sometimes struggles with picking the correct direction. Designers often plan in isolation and fail to consider their audience’s needs or those who will be using their product.

In addition, planning strategies rely on predictions about the future. However, these predictions are often inaccurate and can lead to a flawed strategy. In addition, it takes time to gather information and analyze that data in order to plan effectively. Planning is therefore less dynamic than other strategies and is slower moving as well.

Big Idea #3: The final school of strategy is the positioning school. It views strategy as an analytical process.

Most people don’t want to be burdened with too many choices. They would rather have clear decisions to make instead of having to choose from a variety of options. This can be accomplished by following the positioning school of thought, which states that companies should follow one path and stick with it in order for their brand image to become recognizable.