Where Do Great Strategies Really Come From?

In courses on business strategy, students draw maps of organizations and the landscapes on which they operate, and they learn various classification schemes for strategies, such as different kinds of market positions or organizational capabilities. But these activities do not achieve much when it comes to developing a sense for where great strategies come from in the first place. The missing ingredient is recognizing that strategy-making is a creative act. We know this intuitively. It is the “aha” feature of brilliant strategies that first draws many of us to the topic. In this essay, we look at some examples of great business strategies and view them as creative leaps. We organize the examples into a proposed framework which involves four sources for creativity: contrast, combination, constraint, and context (4 C’s). The hope is that this framework works as a mental prompt for finding new strategies.