Management
Strategic Management
This guide helps you get your bearings in Strategic Management before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.
Before You Dive In
- Strategic management evolved through three eras: planning school (1960s), positioning school (Porter, 1980s), and resource-based view (1990s).
- Porter's Five Forces and the resource-based view (RBV) are the two most influential frameworks — they ask fundamentally different questions about competitive advantage.
- If you're coming from economics, start with Porter; if from organizational theory, start with the resource-based view.
- The field has a persistent tension between analytical frameworks (prescriptive) and behavioral/emergent strategy (descriptive).
Key Terms to Know
Competitive advantageThe attributes that allow a firm to outperform its rivals over time.
Five ForcesPorter's model analyzing industry competition through suppliers, buyers, substitutes, new entrants, and rivalry.
Resource-based viewFirm-specific resources and capabilities, not just industry position, drive sustained advantage.
Dynamic capabilitiesA firm's ability to reconfigure resources in response to changing environments.
Emergent strategyStrategic patterns that arise from actions over time, without deliberate planning (Mintzberg).
Common Confusions
Thinking strategy is just planning — Mintzberg showed that emergent strategies (patterns that arise without planning) are equally important.
Confusing operational effectiveness with strategic positioning — being better at the same thing isn't a strategy.
Assuming frameworks from the 1980s are obsolete — Porter's work and RBV remain foundational in both academia and practice.
Recommended Reading
Competitive Strategy— Michael E. Porter
1980Strategy Safari— Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand & Joseph Lampel
1998Exploring Strategy— Gerry Johnson, Richard Whittington & Kevan Scholes
2023How to Use the Interactive View
1
Explore the timeline
Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?
2
Read the articles
Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.
3
Check the concept map
See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.
4
Test yourself
Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.