Strategy and Performance Management
Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences
July 22, 2025
After this section, you should have a solid understanding of
You are able to apply the knowledge gained to real-life scenarios to describe and provide explanations for strategic decisions made by firms.
Strategy?
A plan to create value.
It may not be quite that simple, but it’s almost.
What is strategy?
In small groups of three or four, discuss what business strategy is and how to recognise a successful business. Identify a company that you can use to illustrate your findings.
Get back to your groups, and apply the value stick concept to the company you have used as an illustration in the last exercise and work on the following questions:
Prepare to present what you found.
A value-based strategy focuses on creating and capturing value for all stakeholders through willingness to pay, pricing strategy, cost management, and willingness to sell.
Value creation is about increasing the total value available to all stakeholders, while value capture is about how much of that value the company retains as profit.
Strategy as plan, ploy, pattern, position, and perspective.
Design, positioning, planning, entrepreneurial, cognitive, learning, power, cultural, environmental & configurational schools
Strategic management is a process that encompasses the formulation, implementation, and adaptation of cross-functional decisions to achieve organizational objectives (Mintzberg 2014).
Strategic management is process-oriented, deliberate and emergent, and influenced by cognition, politics, and culture.
Strategies are about what needs to be done, while tactics are about how it will be done.
A set of unique attributes or capabilities that enable an organization to outperform its competitors in the marketplace.
Executing similar day-to-day activities better than rivals perform them.
M. Porter (1996) argues that operational efficiency is important, but it cannot be a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Do you agree?
The following questions are designed to review and consolidate what you have learned and are a good starting point for preparing for the exam.
Read Felix Oberholzer-Gee’s article about eliminating strategic overload to enhance your understanding of his strategy concept and work on the following questions.
Goals (or objectives) state what is to be achieved, and by when.
Policies are rules or guidelines that express the limits within which action should occur.
Programs specify the step-by-step sequence of actions necessary to achieve major objectives, i.e. how objectives will be achieved within the limits set by policy.