“Big-picture” strategic analysis

Published on August 29, 2021   9 min
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0:00
Greetings and welcome to this session on strategy practice. My name is George Tovstiga and I'm Professor of Strategy at EDHEC Business School in France. In this session, we explore a big picture perspective on strategic analysis and its application in strategy practice.
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Strategy, we have seen in other sessions, is about achieving competitive advantage, creating, delivering, capturing superior value. But where and how do we begin?
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Numerous approaches to strategic analysis have been described in the strategic management literature, of course. In this session, we introduce a visual schematic approach. We begin by examining five key elements you would expect to be addressed by any strategy, the five building blocks of strategy. First, what is that superior value we seek to create, deliver, capture? In other words, what is at the core for unique competing space? For whom are we creating this value? Who are the stakeholders? Where do we intend to compete? What is that external competitive context? What is the organization's basis of competitiveness for achieving our strategic objective? Finally, what sort of an organization will we need in order to actually achieve that objective? Notably, while the fourth and fifth building blocks may appear similar, they do address different aspects of the strategy. For example, the fact that a firm owns resources covered by the fourth building block does not necessarily mean it can exploit these competitively, which would be addressed by the fifth building block.