Strategic Management

London School of Commerce

Strategic Management Assignment

Compare and contrast the prescriptive and descriptive schools of strategy using relevant business examples to support your analysis.

Dilyana Mileva
Student ID: 0271GGGG1008

What is strategy? We can say with certitude there is no unique universally accepted definition. The specialized literature is rich in studies, books and perspectives over the strategy, but this abundance proves the relevance and the complexity of this subject. And this complexity makes it hard to find a single good answer in developing a strategy. As Whittington (2001) said, the different conceptions about the strategy have radically different implications over the strategy’s elaboration process.
Strategy has been around for millennia. One of the earliest written works on strategy was developed by Sun Tzu during the fourth century BC. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that “what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy; next best is to disrupt his alliances; the next best is to attack his army” (1963). Military strategy has existed for thousands of years. It was not until the mid-1960’s that military strategy was applied to business. One of the earliest authors on business strategy was Alfred Chandler. Chandler defined strategy as “the determination of the long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals” (1962).
Following Chandler’s work business thinkers began to consider the discipline of strategic management. Foundational elements were added by Peter Drucker, Bruce Henderson, H. Igor Ansoff, Henry Mintzberg, Michael Porter, Ohmae, Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, Andrew Campbell, Michael Goold and Marcus Alexander.

According to Michael Porter, “developing a competitive strategy is developing a broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies... [continues]

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