Building Strategy and Performance

Abstract

These questions are the starting point for this book. The key to achieving business success is the ability to develop and sustain critical resources and capabilities, leveraging what we have today to grow more of what we will need tomorrow. This book explains the journey your organization takes through time as it builds this portfolio of vital resources. It provides innovative ideas that enable readers to answer the three questions and develop a sustainable winning strategy. The approach described here is based on strategy dynamics (Warren, 2008), a rigorous, fact-based method for developing and managing strategy. The underlying science is known as system dynamics, which originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s (Forrester, 1961; Sterman, 2000). Strategy dynamics explain why the performance of an organization has changed through time in the way that it has, provide estimates of where it is likely to go in the future, and allow management to design strategies and policies to improve that future path. Strategy dynamics achieve this by building an integrated, fact-based picture of how the resources of your business are developing through time, driven by mutual interdependence, management policies, external opportunities, and constraints.