| name | MGT510-Strategy-Planning |
| description | Knowledge base from "Contemporary Strategy Analysis" (11th edition) by Robert M. Grant. Use when applying strategy frameworks for strategic fit, industry analysis, competitive advantage, resources and capabilities, innovation, globalization, diversification, corporate scope, implementation, or current strategy trends. |
Contemporary Strategy Analysis
Author: Robert M. Grant | Edition: 11th (2022) | Pages: ~544 PDF pages | Chapters: 14 plus appendix | Generated: 2026-08-21
How to Use This Skill
- Without arguments - load the core strategy toolkit below.
- With a topic - find the relevant chapter from the topic index, then read that chapter file.
- With a chapter - ask for
ch03, ch10, or appendix to load the detailed framework file.
- Browse - ask for the chapter index or supporting files.
When a question is not covered in the Core Frameworks below, read the relevant
chapter file before answering. Use the book's exact framework names and state
the decision rule, assumptions, trade-offs, and evidence required.
Core Frameworks & Mental Models
- Strategy as fit: Link goals and values, the external environment, resources and capabilities, and structure and management systems. Ask both "where to compete?" and "how to compete?" Strategy is a direction and set of priorities, not a detailed forecast.
- Strategy process: Set the strategic agenda, analyze the situation, formulate, implement, and learn. Combine deliberate design with planned emergence. Judge realized strategy from investments, products, technologies, projects, and appointments, not rhetoric alone.
- Value and performance: Use economic profit (
operating profit - WACC x capital) and DCF for long-run value. Diagnose ROA/ROCE by separating margin from asset turnover, then trace each to controllable drivers. Balance financial targets with customer, process, and learning measures. Under uncertainty, stage investments to preserve real options.
- Industry analysis: Define boundaries through demand and supply substitution. Use Porter's Five Forces to explain profitability and forecast how trends change each force. Derive key success factors from what customers want and how firms survive competition.
- Beyond Five Forces: Add complements, ecosystems, platforms, network externalities, business models, game theory, competitor behavior, segmentation, and strategic groups when industry structure is dynamic or interdependent. Use game theory to clarify choices and payoffs, not to claim false precision.
- Resources and capabilities: Trace resources into capabilities, strategy, advantage, and profit. Test relevance and scarcity to establish advantage; durability, transferability, and replicability to sustain it; and appropriability to determine who captures the returns.
- Implementation: Treat formulation and implementation as interdependent. Use strategic planning cycles, budgets, owners, KPIs, and reviews. Match rules, routines, or mutual adjustment to task interdependence. Choose functional, multidivisional, matrix, project, network, mechanistic, or organic forms by contingency and coordination need.
- Competitive advantage: Advantage is relative and temporary. Create it through anticipation, agility, business-model innovation, and Blue Ocean's raise/eliminate/reduce/create actions. Sustain it with isolating mechanisms such as deterrence, preemption, causal ambiguity, and difficult-to-replicate activity systems. Analyze cost drivers and differentiation through value-chain linkages.
- Industry evolution and innovation: Match capabilities to life-cycle stage. Use ambidexterity to exploit today while exploring tomorrow, and dynamic capabilities to sense, seize, and reconfigure. For technology, map appropriability, complementary resources, standards, platforms, network effects, timing, and commercialization mode before committing.
- Corporate scope: For vertical integration, compare market transaction costs with internal governance costs and consider hybrid relationships. For global strategy, apply the National Diamond, CAGE, entry ladder, and Ghemawat's aggregation/adaptation/arbitrage. For diversification, apply Porter's attractiveness, cost-of-entry, and better-off tests, then test parenting advantage.
- Multibusiness management: Use the Ashridge Portfolio Display, GE/McKinsey, and BCG as screens, not verdicts. Corporate headquarters should manage the portfolio, link businesses, improve individual units, and enable change while keeping parent-added value above overhead and complexity costs.
- External growth: Treat mergers, acquisitions, and alliances as governance modes. Choose internal development, contract, alliance, or acquisition according to resource transferability and required integration. Quantify synergies after premiums and integration risk; preserve autonomy when a new business model would be damaged by integration.
- Current trends: Treat digital ecosystems, systemic risk, legitimacy, real options, transient advantage, informal organization, self-organization, and changing managerial roles as emerging approaches that augment rather than replace rigorous conventional analysis.
Chapter Index
| # | Title | Key Frameworks |
|---|
| ch01 | The Concept of Strategy | strategic fit; strategy process; planned emergence |
| ch02 | Goals, Values, and Performance | EVA; DCF; balanced scorecard; real options |
| ch03 | Industry Analysis: The Fundamentals | Five Forces; industry boundaries; KSFs |
| ch04 | Further Topics in Industry and Competitive Analysis | ecosystems; game theory; segmentation; strategic groups |
| ch05 | Analyzing Resources and Capabilities | resource-based view; capability tests; benchmarking |
| ch06 | Organization Structure and Management Systems | planning cycle; coordination; mechanistic/organic fit |
| ch07 | The Sources and Dimensions of Competitive Advantage | cost; differentiation; isolating mechanisms; value chain |
| ch08 | Industry Evolution and Strategic Change | life cycle; ambidexterity; dynamic capabilities |
| ch09 | Technology-Based Industries and the Management of Innovation | appropriability; standards; platforms; innovation matrix |
| ch10 | Vertical Integration and the Scope of the Firm | transaction costs; make-or-buy; hybrid governance |
| ch11 | Global Strategy and the Multinational Corporation | National Diamond; CAGE; AAA; entry modes |
| ch12 | Diversification Strategy | three tests; economies of scope; parenting advantage |
| ch13 | Implementing Corporate Strategy: Managing the Multibusiness Firm | Ashridge; BCG; GE/McKinsey; corporate control |
Topic Index
- Ambidexterity -> ch08, ch09
- Business models -> ch04, ch07, ch09, ch14
- Competitive advantage -> ch01, ch05, ch07, ch08
- Corporate parenting -> ch12, ch13
- Diversification -> ch12, ch13
- Dynamic capabilities -> ch05, ch08, ch14
- Ecosystems and complements -> ch04, ch09, ch14
- Five Forces -> ch03, ch04
- Global strategy and CAGE -> ch11
- Industry life cycle -> ch08
- Industry profitability -> ch02, ch03, ch04
- Innovation and technology -> ch08, ch09, ch14
- Mergers and acquisitions -> ch12, ch13, appendix
- Organizational structure -> ch06, ch08, ch13, ch14
- Performance diagnosis -> ch02, ch06, ch13
- Real options -> ch02, ch09, ch14, appendix
- Resources and capabilities -> ch05, ch07, ch08
- Strategic groups and segmentation -> ch04
- Strategic fit -> ch01, ch06, ch07
- Standards and platforms -> ch04, ch09, ch14
- Transaction costs and vertical integration -> ch10, ch12, appendix
- Value chain -> ch05, ch07, ch10
Supporting Files
Scope & Limits
This skill covers Robert M. Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis, 11th edition,
only. It is a strategy-analysis knowledge base, not a substitute for current market,
financial, legal, or industry research. For implementation in a specific organization,
combine these frameworks with current evidence and project-specific tools.
