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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

“Strategy” – what’s in a name?

I started wondering yesterday about the connection between “strategy” and the change process on which I spent so much time last year. And why I had failed to include the term in that 60-page paper about Change.

A STRATEGY is something an individual or organisation develops when they want to move from a present they see as problematic to a better futureIt involves designing and implementing CHANGE – and can be done at different levels

  • of the individual person – when, for example, (s)he wants to change diet or career

  • organisational – both commercial and governmental. Companies will develop strategies for their change efforts whereas governments will tend to talk about “policies” (eg social, economic, urban, regional, military etc)

  • societal – when the private, public and voluntary sectors team up to deal with an intractable problem – whether at the local, national or international level. Language tends to vary at this level – “anti-corruption strategies” is a frequently used term but, for some reason, there seem few “global warming” strategies.

In the beginning, it was the generals who used the language of strategy – 19th century Clausewitz being the most famous and it was American business that started to use the term in the 1960s. Indeed it’s only been in the last couple of decades we’ve see definitive texts about strategy – in particular

Richard Rumelt (2011) 

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