Strategy - The Biggest GLOBE

What is strategy?

This is the opening line of a world famous and most quoted paper by Michael Porter and is the opening line of plethora of books on strategy by different authors, all claiming to be authorities on a topic which cannot be mastered by their own admission. The first page of any text book on strategy claims that it is not easily defined and is very subjective and open to interpretation. Yet isn’t it funny that they are writing a book of 1000 pages about something which they admit cannot be actually taught in a classroom? After reading all the 1000 pages, neither the author is clear about what is he talking about, neither the teacher who “facilitated “ this course nor the hundred odd students who were actually supposed to learn it.
To pile on the misery, we have the siblings or descendants ( I, being so weak on strategy could not figure out how the taxonomy works) of Strategy by really wicked names like Corporate Strategy, Business Strategy, Marketing strategy. HR Strategy, Transnational strategy and blah blah blah. To make the matters worse, we have derivatives on strategy like strategic intent, strategic positioning etc and etc. If defining the indefinable was not enough, people have added qualifiers just like they are adding prefixes to normal English words.
OK, now you may ask what is my opinion/ definition/view on strategy. To set the record right, I do not believe that there is anything called strategy. However, just to avoid loss of face to the questioner, I would say that strategy is simple common sense. All the gyan that are captured in fancy looking frameworks are just nothing but embellishments over some trivial idea which I am sure anyone can think of. But then we have a great obsession with all neat looking diagrams containing words which no one understands in beautiful shapes of triangles, diamonds and pentagrams.
Even if we assume that strategy is more than plain common sense, it raises a fundamental question what purpose does strategy serve in a business. It does not help us get more sales, does not help with financing or understanding the costs nor it deals with motivating the people. It does not help me wit my production as well. Then, do we actually need so many courses in strategy as part of the curriculum in an MBA program? Wont we be better off with a reduced load? Or if some people feel it’s a cardinal sin to have free time for yourself in a b-school, we can have one or two courses which encourage you to study some industry in great detail thereby helping you in making a career choice.
The only reason why strategy is taught in a b-school is because it keeps a specific breed of academicians relevant in the overall scheme of things and they continue to pile up garbage in the name of academic research. They come out with fancy ideas with fancier names which devoid of all embellishments is basically something that’s what everyone is supposed to do in business. These academicians come out with new and new theories which help them to make the text books thicker and thicker. The corporate then hire these academicians for consulting projects with the hope that their company name gets published as a pioneering practitioner of the latest crazy idea that a crazy professor has come up.

Isn’t it funny that all great strategies are known only in hindsight when the company has successfully executed its plans? For all the pedigree of the academic researchers, why can’t they predict if a particular strategy would be successful or not? They can always do a good post mortem but would be horrible if they have to stick out their neck out and say it would work. The greatest joke is when a particular strategy fails they take refuge in the fact that it was not poor strategy formulation but poor implementation that led to the downfall. If implementation is what actually matters, then why so much noise about strategy formulation in the first place?
If Wal-Mart is successful, its not because it has a low cost strategy but because its managers are good at finding ways to achieve lowest costs and are capable of doing it successfully. All the competitors of Wal-Mart are trying the same strategy but are unable to do so. If strategy actually mattered, then all of them should have been successful. The bottom line is its Execution that matters and not strategy in business. If the b-schools want to churn out entrepreneurs in large numbers, they should stop all the strategy courses and replace them with courses consisting of field work and execution challenges