Strategy and Tactics in Design

I am describing a strategy as a design rather than as a plan or as a choice because I want to emphasize the issue of mutual adjustment. In design problems, where various elements must be arranged, adjusted, and coordinated, there can be sharply peaked gains to getting combinations right and sharp costs to getting them wrong. A good strategy coordin

he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen.

Many people assume that a strategy is a big-picture overall direction, divorced from any specific action. But defining strategy as broad concepts, thereby leaving out action, creates a wide chasm between “strategy” and “implementation.” If you accept this chasm, most strategy work becomes wheel spinning. Indeed, this is the most common complaint ab

Take an MBA course on strategy, and you will be exposed to a few case studies of classic business-strategy success stories. But, increasingly, your instructor will use these cases as “examples” of his or her favorite concepts from industrial organization economics. Again, you cannot deduce a good strategy from theory. Much of design is a combinatio