Business Strategy: New Thinking for the ‘90s

Let’s rethink. What is strategy? To many, strategy once meant selecting the most attractive product/ market segments and determining the appropriate level of investment in each. Many useful tools and concepts, developed largely during the 1970s, gave managers important insights into the comparative attractiveness of the business options they faced (Exhibit 1). These constructs, which characterize business segments in terms of some variant of industry maturity and competitive position, have proven to be useful reflections of the levels of profitability – and hence the attractiveness – of a business at a given time. They remain valuable aids in addressing ques tions about expansion into new markets or businesses and in facing challenges of divestiture, business restructuring, or retrenchment.