Prescribing Strategies

Not like blinds, experience the situation and then decide what to do. Prescriptive strategy maker believes that strategies are articulated and ready to eat kind of food recipe for any organization. Mile and Snow gave, in the same context four generic strategies like Analyzer, Defender, Prospector and reactors. Michael E. Porter also gave same kind of generic strategies like Differentiation, Cost Leadership and Focused strategies. According to these strategy makers strategies are just choosing the one best strategy for their organization and select a position in industry between their competitors. Choosing one best position is also need a long tail of analysis, calculations and statistical research. They need to see where they are in Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG), how much they have market potential as well as business strength by General Electric Matrix (GE) and they also need to know and balance the most important thing their internal and external capabilities and opportunities. However these prescriptive types of full blown completely articulated strategies have some of the major problems with them. They give the authority of strategy making to just the top management like CEO, consultants and some of the organizational planners. They have not any kind of involvement of operational or even managerial level people. Another issue that they are mostly biased toward the big organizations with very stable external environment and mature industry. They haven't any option of emergent strategy. All with these critique this type of strategy making also have contribution in management world.