Strategic Thinking : Explorations Around Conflict and Cooperation

Strategic Thinking is an exploration of the world of strategic action centred on the strategist actor who remains immersed in the multi-faceted conflicts and contests of the pragmatic life of business. The strategist actor seeks a 'win' and searches for power; his strategic action is aimed at securing governance and hence seeks to subvert inter-organizational balance to this end. The authors argue that strategic action is imagined and executed in a 'milieu', populated by power holders who provide a countervailing threat to the pursuits of a strategist. This intensely governed strategy 'milieu', where relations and transactions between power holders are under the governance of a current set of rules and institutions, is what strategic acts remain deeply interested in as it attempts to establish altered dimensions of governance advantageous to the strategist. This book explores the various modes through which nodes of power holders are formed or decimated in the organization. It embraces the twin dimensions of strategic motives-deterrence and novel market making-around the theme of governance, without conflating the differences between these differing motives riding on differing dynamics of decreasing and increasing returns.