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There are few concepts in the modern business lexicon where people feel as strongly confident in their understanding of its meaning – while there is simultaneously such profound disagreement in how people actually define the term – than the concept of “strategy.” After decades of research and publications trying to correct this situation, the problem remains. It is difficult to advance the field, teach the field, or even effectively put it into practice if you cannot define what “it” is in a clear, concise, and meaningful way. This paper offers updated definitions of key strategic management concepts.

A large academic and practitioner literature review was added to the author’s personal experience as a Fortune 500 chief strategy officer and university professor to identify five separate concepts at the heart of current colloquial uses of the term “strategy.” These concepts were then clarified and defined with implications summarized.

The generic term “strategy” is frequently used in place of multiple other very distinct concepts. This problem of concept ambiguity can be greatly reduced by understanding and emphasizing the definitions and usage of five other, already existing, business terms – “Strategic Management,” “Strategic Planning Process,” “Strategic Plan,” “Realized Strategy,” and “Business Model.”

This paper identifies the negative effects of the misuse of the term strategy and offers clear, concise remedies. Resolving the definition problems is a necessary precursor to the advancement, education, and practice of the field.

Strategy Question: Is there a simple, “real-world” definition of strategy?

Summary: We define strategy as an integrated set of actions and resource commitments that position an organization within the competitive environment so as to generate superior results over time. There are five key concepts to this definition. Strategy is integrative, encompassing all of the activities of an organization and the manner in which those fit together. It involves the commitment of organization resources — human, financial, capital, etc. — in ways that lead to effective action. These actions position the enterprise relative to all others within a competitive environment that includes customers, suppliers, and competitors along with external factors such as political, economic, and social trends. If the position in the marketplace is aligned with customer’s needs and wants, the firm will be able to achieve superior results and outcomes.

Focuses on Internet strategy and its place in corporate distribution strategy. The underlying purpose of the research is to review the relationship between the generic and Internet strategies of retail institutions in the financial services industry and thus determine whether there exists an alignment between them. The corporate strategy is conceptualised through Michael Porter’s generic strategies: differentiation, cost leadership and focus. For the Internet strategy, the three options translate into certain actions on the marketplace and in the adoption of specific information technologies. The technology analysis observes the frequency of OFX adoption among the sample population based on the published list of software vendors (Quicken and Microsoft). The pricing analysis is based on each financial institution’s retail transaction account price as calculated through a defined process using the fee structure of the account. The obtained data are then used for an empirical test for any relationships between the adoption of OFX transactional technology and pricing of retail transaction accounts.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the use of Strategy Maps substantially improves the implementation success of balanced scorecards (BSC). The BSC is supposed to translate strategy into action. Strategy maps support this by showing cause-and-effect chains. But what does this mean for strategy execution in practice? To achieve better BSC implementations, the author uncovers pitfalls and names the remedies.

The author summarizes the most important findings from initially over 1,000 studies that have dealt with the BSC from 1992 to 2012.

BSC implementations that use a sophisticated Strategy Map appear to be successful. Strategy maps foster a better understanding of the BSC among employees, create greater commitment and less resistance and are superior to the BSC itself in communicating how to achieve strategic goals. Also, strategy maps facilitate managers’ evaluation of the relevant environment. Nevertheless, the common measure bias is a usual pitfall: top managers have a tendency to use their own strategic targets as a yardstick for lower-level employees.

This paper helps managers understand the most recent developments on strategy maps. In particular, the author highlights that causalities do not exist in organizations in the same way as there are “laws” in physics. Instead, organizations need to customize their BSC to their way of doing business.

The purpose of this paper is to present a discussion with Joan Magretta about her new book, Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy with two veteran S&L contributing editors.

Based on her long editorial relationship with Porter while she was strategy editor of the Harvard Business Review, she suggests some key lessons about applying his concepts that practitioners should take to heart.

The paper reveals that Magretta believes that too many managers get their Porter second hand and what they usually end up getting is both inadequate and inaccurate. She seeks to rectify the most common misconceptions about strategy and Porter's work.

Some key practical lessons are: keep a direct line of sight between your strategy and your financial performance – if strategy is to have any meaning at all, it must link directly to a company's results; a distinctive value proposition is essential for strategy, but don't confuse strategy with marketing (the demand side); the supply side must be linked; meaningful strategy makes it clear what the organization will not do – making trade‐offs is the linchpin that makes competitive advantage possible and sustainable; do not feel you have to “delight” every possible customer. The sign of a good strategy is that it deliberately makes some customers unhappy.

Magretta, who gained front‐line experience as a consultant at Bain, reviews Porter's groundbreaking strategy work and makes it relevant to today's managers

This article addresses the widespread failure of organizations to turn strategy talk into action. It suggests that underlying this failure is the creation of strategy “ducks” – a term borrowed from the world of architecture for buildings intentionally built as symbols. The author here argues that many corporations, in an effort to appear “strategic,” have inadvertently created strategy ducks – strategies that function as symbols, not roadmaps that remain an abstraction and a mystery to the people in the organization who must make them work. As with architecture's ducks, the connection between symbol and day‐to‐day practice is missing. In creating the appearance of a strategy where none exists, these ducks risk leaving the majority of the organization with little recourse other than to “fake it” – to act as though a meaningful strategy exists, when in fact it doesn't. What organizations need instead are strategies that feel real. The article suggests that, in order to close this gap between rhetoric and action, we need to construct strategy “sheds” instead.

This paper reviews the literature to examine what makes something feel “real.” Feeling real is a subjective perception, a personal judgment that each individual makes. The article explores the concept of real – drawing on work in psychology and, again, in architecture to answer the question: what makes anything feel real?

Four components are identified: firstly, presence – attracting attention, secondly, significance – making it matter, thirdly, materiality – offering substance, and finally, emptiness – inviting us in. Each component offers managers a useful lens into strategy making that enhances understanding of organizations' knowing‐doing gaps in a powerful way, and helps address the question “Is your strategy a duck?”

This paper is oriented towards executives and aimed at helping them to understand what it takes to make strategies convincingly real to other members of the organizations, and more likely to be successfully implemented.

Many public sector organizations have shown a consistent lack of capability to execute their strategic plans compared with private sector organizations. This failure explains why most public sector organizations are grappling with the dynamics of the twenty-first century in service delivery. Further, the strategy execution gap is vast in the public sector organizations than in the private sector organizations. The purpose of this paper is built based on the curiosity to develop a conceptual model that can close the strategy execution gap in public sector organizations.

The research adopted a qualitative research design, particularly, a case study research design approach as an ideal tool to conduct a holistic and in-depth survey of the trends in strategy execution in the public sector.

From the findings of the study, it has been found that five out of the nine strategy execution components that were investigated showed higher scores. These strategy execution components perceived to be vital by this study and were integrated into the MERIL-DE model, which will significantly contribute to closing the strategy execution gap in the public sector.

This research was built based on the curiosity to develop a conceptual model, the MERIL-DE model that can close the strategy execution gap in public sector organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide higher education institutions with strategies of continuing education and methods to communicate and implement these strategies.

The balanced scorecard approach is used to implement the strategy. It translates the strategy into tangible objectives, measures and targets and balances them into four different perspectives: customer, finance, internal processes, and learning.

The strategy of focus combined with the strategy of cost‐efficiency is applicable for higher education institutions. These strategies can be adjusted, for example, to profitable growth in continuing education.

The balanced scorecard approach can be used widely in higher education institutions and with slight modifications in other public sector organisations. The customer perspective typically includes the desired objectives in the public sector, contrary to the private sector where it is reasonable to place finance at the top of the perspectives.

The study also presents a useful example of how the strategy can be described using the concept of a strategy map and numerical balanced scorecards.

It turns out that the strategies of focus and cost‐effectiveness and the balanced scorecard approach, developed in the business literature, can be successfully applied in continuing education.

Despite 40 years of research by many social science disciplines, the conduct of planning in the business firm is not well modelled or understood. For marketers, this presents a particularly important problem. Marketing planning is particularly susceptible to the heirarchical nature of the planning process and the need to develop both deliberate and emergent plans. Since marketers provide the interface between the firm and its markets and customers, they must provide the essential strategic and tactical planning direction to the firm's overall strategic planning process. Marketing planning has a strategic and tactical component. Marketers must be precise with their use of terminology, being careful to identify exactly what they mean when they use the terms planning, marketing and strategy.

The purpose of the study was to find out the determinants of strategy implementation by the international reproductive health (RH) non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Kenya for attainment of MDG 5 by 2015. The objectives of the study were to analyse the effects of the determinants of strategy implementation for attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 by international RH NGOs operating in Kenya. This study was guided by three specific objectives: to analyse the effect of policy regulations on strategy implementation by international RH NGOs in attainment of MDG 5; to determine the effect of management competencies on strategy implementation by international RH NGOs in attainment of MDG 5 and to explore the effect of resource allocation on strategy implementation by international RH NGOs in attainment of MDG 5 by 2015 in Kenya.

A cross-sectional descriptive study design was carried out from January to March 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya. The study populations comprised of programme staff and RH technical advisors for the international RH NGOs operating in Kenya and headquartered in Nairobi. The sampling design was a census method since all the ten international RH NGOs based in Nairobi were selected. Qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used using both closed and open-ended questionnaires. The quantitative data were analysed using SPSS version 20 for both descriptive and inferential analysis. Qualitative data were analysed descriptively. Measures of location and variability were used for analysis and hypothesis tested using Fisher ' s Exact test and regression analysis.

The research findings showed that policy regulations, management competencies and the resource allocations determine successful implementation of the strategic plans. Inadequate resource allocations have a direct bearing on the implementation of the RH programmes which invariably affects the attainment of the MDG 5 by 2015. The study did not accept the null hypotheses and therefore showed that there is relationship between policy regulations, management competencies and resource allocations and the implementation of strategic management plans by international RH NGOs operating in Kenya.

Although numerous studies acknowledge that strategies frequently fail not because of inadequate strategy formulation, but because of insufficient implementation, strategy implementation has received less research attention than strategy formulation. This paper addresses this gap.