History of Business Strategy

Traditional views on strategy were borne from a military definition of the word that historically referred to the manner in which troops would be deployed prior to battle. In the business world, this was translated into the manner in which resources would be deployed to beat the competition. This is a broad definition of business (competitive) strategy, but nonetheless remains generally true.

Despite this, in the 1980s, as Japanese car manufacturers began outdoing their American rivals with a focus on low-cost, high quality manufacturing, others began to imitate Japanese “lean production” techniques. As a result, competitive strategy , or the lack thereof, became largely about lowering costs, increasing quality, and generally increasing efficiencies.

Then, in 1996, the prevailing views of business strategy were summarily dismissed by Michael Porter, the godfather of modern competitive strategy, in an article in Harvard Business Review entitled, “What is Strategy?”