Strategic Management Review

Textbook review in strategy.

Strategic Management: A Competitive Advantage Approach had its 17th edition produced in 2022. It is a pretty good overview of business strategy at a top down level and at some of the divisional levels, such as marketing and finance. Unfortunately, I am, once again, already quite familiar with the concepts laid out in the book. I particularly enjoyed Chapter 6, however, which offers some frameworks for strategic analysis.

The book answers a number of questions and ultimately answers the question of how do we anchor our business decision making in long term directions (also guides short term decision making). The essence of strategy is manage resources to achieve advantage in the market. Similar to the revisitation of Michael Porter's work, the idea is to focus on uniqueness, rather than price or trying to do it all, which tends to not work well.

There is definitely very useful advice in the book but some parts feel superfluous (could just be me though) and not well fleshed out. For example, the majority of the analyses conducted to come to strategic decisions are based on identifying the most critical factors and then ranking them. The book suggests we do so in a way that seems arbitrary. My contention would be to assign concrete, important metrics to assess importance. For example, the factors could be ranked by estimated impact on net income. This would depend on the context of course, and the factor analyses can still be repurposed (based on importance to customers for example) for general analysis.

While I don't recommend this as much as the revisitation of Michael Porter's work from Routledge, which I felt had a better grasp on the guiding philosophy of strategy, there is a lot here that can be foundational and descriptive for anyone new to business strategy formation. Strategic Management includes topics on organizational structure, strategy formulation, and (very) basic financial analysis. There are also many classic frameworks fleshed out in this book, such as Porter's 5 Forces, BCG matrix, and some more general ones like an Internal Factor Evaluation matrix. So I would still recommend giving this one a read.

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