Aug 2, 2026 · 22 min · 9 segments
This article by Seidl, Ma, and Splitter examines the concept of **strategy-as-practice** by addressing the fundamental ambiguity regarding what makes an activity "strategic." The authors propose a new…
Himanshu WarudkarHostSo what actually makes a coffee or a meeting or some massive enterprise AI initiative truly strategic? Today, we're diving into this fascinating 2024 framework from the Strategic Management Journal to give you a shortcut to reading the hidden architecture of your own company.
Yeah.
And the researchers here spent a massive amount of time looking at this glaring ambiguity in how we understand business.
Like, how do we actually define an activity as strategic in the first place?
You'd think so.
Right.
I mean, for the longest time, the traditional assumption was just that strategy was something a company had.
It was, you know, a dusty document sitting in a drawer somewhere in the C-suite.
Exactly.
But eventually this movement called strategy as practice came along and completely shifted the focus away from the document.
They said, no, we need to look at what people actually do.
Which makes sense.
Right.
But the challenge is if you want to understand how a company really operates, especially when rolling out complex stuff like AI, you have to look at the daily activities.
But which activities actually count as the strategy?
Exactly.
And the framework we're looking at today argues there isn't one universal answer.
Instead, there are four distinct lenses through which we construct what makes an action strategic.
And understanding the friction between these four lenses explains so much about why corporate life, well, feels the way it does.
So what actually makes a coffee or a meeting or some massive enterprise AI initiative truly strategic? Today, we're diving into this fascinating 2024 framework from the Strategic Management Journal to give you a shortcut to reading the hidden architecture of your own company.
Yeah.
And the researchers here spent a massive amount of time looking at this glaring ambiguity in how we understand business.
Like, how do we actually define an activity as strategic in the first place?
You'd think so.
Right.
I mean, for the longest time, the traditional assumption was just that strategy was something a company had.
It was, you know, a dusty document sitting in a drawer somewhere in the C-suite.
Exactly.
But eventually this movement called strategy as practice came along and completely shifted the focus away from the document.
They said, no, we need to look at what people actually do.
Which makes sense.
Right.
But the challenge is if you want to understand how a company really operates, especially when rolling out complex stuff like AI, you have to look at the daily activities.
But which activities actually count as the strategy?
Exactly.
And the framework we're looking at today argues there isn't one universal answer.
Instead, there are four distinct lenses through which we construct what makes an action strategic.
And understanding the friction between these four lenses explains so much about why corporate life, well, feels the way it does.
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