New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing
Sep 4, 2026 · 1 hr · 11 segments
Alfie Marcus is ordinarily the host of *On the Cusp Between Strategy and Ethics*, where he interviews authors about the intersection of organizational strategy, corporate responsibility, and the…
Can you define strategy a bit? When people hear the word strategy, they might have different ideas, but how do you think about what strategy encompasses?
That's a great question because I think it has evolved in my own thinking as I've taught strategy.
I think anybody who teaches strategy is still influenced by the books that Michael Porter wrote in the early 1980s.
And strategy, the goal of strategy is to achieve some type of sustained competitive advantage.
Rather than winning one championship, which can be based on luck, When you're a dynasty, when you do it continuously for year after year, then there has to be something more behind it.
But as I've taught strategy more and more, I think that the most important thing about strategy is that you're making bets on the future.
In some ways, strategy is not that much different than picking your investments, your personal investments.
In the sense that you are committing your resources both monetarily, if you're a company, and also the resources in respect to the human resources that you have, your people, you're committing them to certain paths.
And there's huge amounts of uncertainty as to whether those paths will result in benefits to your company and benefits to society because many of these decisions have society-wide impacts.
And so it's dealing with that uncertainty of making long-term investment choices where there's a great deal of uncertainty.
So when I teach now, I think the most important thing I do is make students do in teams.
and have them do in teams and say, if you were the top management team of this company, what would be the three major investments you would make and why and how much commitment would you make to them? I think those are the key strategic decisions.
Of course, companies can adjust this and they can pull back at certain points in time, which is a very hard choice to make if the investments aren't going well.
We can talk about individual companies in the book or companies in general, but I think they're vital and they're almost existential in nature because of the unknown.
Can you define strategy a bit? When people hear the word strategy, they might have different ideas, but how do you think about what strategy encompasses?
That's a great question because I think it has evolved in my own thinking as I've taught strategy.
I think anybody who teaches strategy is still influenced by the books that Michael Porter wrote in the early 1980s.
And strategy, the goal of strategy is to achieve some type of sustained competitive advantage.
Rather than winning one championship, which can be based on luck, When you're a dynasty, when you do it continuously for year after year, then there has to be something more behind it.
But as I've taught strategy more and more, I think that the most important thing about strategy is that you're making bets on the future.
In some ways, strategy is not that much different than picking your investments, your personal investments.
In the sense that you are committing your resources both monetarily, if you're a company, and also the resources in respect to the human resources that you have, your people, you're committing them to certain paths.
And there's huge amounts of uncertainty as to whether those paths will result in benefits to your company and benefits to society because many of these decisions have society-wide impacts.
And so it's dealing with that uncertainty of making long-term investment choices where there's a great deal of uncertainty.
So when I teach now, I think the most important thing I do is make students do in teams.
and have them do in teams and say, if you were the top management team of this company, what would be the three major investments you would make and why and how much commitment would you make to them? I think those are the key strategic decisions.
Of course, companies can adjust this and they can pull back at certain points in time, which is a very hard choice to make if the investments aren't going well.
We can talk about individual companies in the book or companies in general, but I think they're vital and they're almost existential in nature because of the unknown.
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