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What strategy is (and what it isn’t):

Strategy Driven

His 2013 book, Strategy: A History, which took 40 years to write, is the best book ever written outlining the entire history of the development of strategy. Strategy is about the “how.” A policy may have an implementation strategy behind it. Every conflict ever known has figured in some kind of attack or reaction.

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Disrupting the Gaming Industry with the Same Old Playbook

Harvard Business Review

With a market size of $8 billion in 2013 Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) is becoming big business. million as of 2013. LoL’s 2013 World Championship garnered online viewership of 32 million on Twitch.tv Stories like LoL and Vans illustrate a profound truth about strategy and business. And what a viewership!

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How Boards Can Assess the Health of Their Companies

Harvard Business Review

A company that creates a sustainable competitive advantage, executes well and reinvests to solidify its strategy will find that its share price accurately reflects its value. When CEO Tex Gunning took over in 2013, he spent weeks in depots and on trucks and wrote to every frontline employee asking for input.

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Tinkering with Strategy Can Derail Midsize Companies

Harvard Business Review

Cellairis had tinkered with its core strategy, one that had been working beautifully, and it had turned ugly. System-wide revenue for 2013 was $350 million – seven times revenue for 2005. By mid-2013, the company was chugging along at a $200 million annual revenue rate. Tinkering can kill midsize companies.

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A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment

Harvard Business Review

Using the same 1 – 100 scale ask yourself: How well does our organization support the achievement of our strategy? If your organization is incapable of delivering its strategy, the strategy is effectively worthless and your company’s purpose will go more or less unfulfilled.

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Google’s Strategy vs. Glass’s Potential

Harvard Business Review

In 2013, BusinessWeek quoted Google X director Astro Teller as saying, “If there’s an enormous problem with the world, and we can convince ourselves that over some long but not unreasonable period of time we can make that problem go away, then we don’t need a business plan.” Should Google revise its strategy to pursue that opportunity?

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Research: How a New CEO Can Make a Firm More Entrepreneurial

Harvard Business Review

Indeed, the company eventually announced its strategy to venture massively into cloud computing. We researched changes in a firm’s entrepreneurial strategy after CEO successions. We did this by measuring the entrepreneurial strategic focus stated in the annual letters to shareholders of S&P 500 firms between 2000 and 2013.

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