Commentary on ‘procedural justice, strategic decision making and the knowledge economy’ by W. C. Kim and R. Mauborgne

✍ Scribed by Karel Cool

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 21 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0143-2095
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(199804)19:4<339::aid-smj985>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

Few strategy researchers and managers would disagree with the statement that strategy is about the pursuit and exploitation of competitive advantage. However, major disagreement often surfaces in the debate on how competitive advantage is measured, built, exploited, and renewed. Several years ago, Henry Minztberg (1990) evoked the metaphor of the 'blind men and the elephant' to describe the complexity of strategy making in organizations and the many partial strategy frameworks and views that had been developed and defended.

During the past decade, great strides have been made on one particular view of strategy, the so-called 'economic' view. This perspective has proposed a number of concepts, frameworks and, tools which deal primarily with the 'analytics' of competitive advantage. Strategy analyses now invariably consider value chains, core competencies, and generic strategies. Though the validity of the 'five forces' framework has been questioned, it still is the model which is used most frequently to understand industry profit dynamics. The transaction cost view will possibly also lead to some practical tools to help managers build and exploit competitive advantage.

A view that gained particular prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the resourcebased view of competitive advantage.