A Quasi-Analytic Approach to the Business Strategy Problem

Abstract

Some fifteen years ago the RAND Corporation first attempted to broaden its field of interest to include the policy and strategy formulation in the military establishment. The initial reaction of the responsible officers in the Pentagon was that the nature of the military policy problem was quite different from weapons systems analysis and selection in which RAND specialized and that the tools used in the latter simply did not carry over into the policy area. Techniques and concepts of weapons systems optimization did not apply to the esoteric area of strategic planning. Strategy was an art, not a science, and was going to remain so. Time has proved this reaction to be only partially right. It is true that analysis of strategy requires additional concepts and methodologies which differ in some significant respects from the operations research techniques used in systems analysis. On the other hand, very substantial progress has been made in analytic studies of military strategy formulation. Management Technology, ISSN 0542-4917, was published as a separate journal from 1960 to 1964. In 1965 it was merged into Management Science.