Strategic Renaissance.(Review)

Strategic Renaissance Evan M. Dudik American Management Association (AMACOM) 2000 259 pages, $27.95 Hard-cover

Strategic Renaissance uses a sophisticated, resourceful, and result-oriented approach to help companies create strategy in today's fast changing environment. The author, Evan M. Dudik argues that "the best way to create a winning strategy is to create strategic hypotheses, temper them in the furnace of falsification, then aggressively feed all available energy, talent, and money into the crucial elements of the strategy-whether focused products, key markets, or crucial functions-while starving the others." The foundation of Dudik's approach is its reach back into the richness of human history and the habits, logic, and values of science.

While recognizing that publishers produce approximately 2,000 business books on strategy a year and that each approach contains some truth in their approach, Dudik dismisses most as impractical, unprofitable, and incomplete. He contents that the ability to produce dozens of examples of successful companies is not sufficient to establish a strategic approach as successful. The author asserts that this is the "empirical method run amok". A theory's influence and importance lie in its ability to specify what observations or consequences would make the strategic theory false i.e. its falsifiability. Dudik believes great descriptive power coupled with great specificity about what observations would make a theory false is the test of importance for a theory. Since strategy is a hypothesis, according to the author, companies can create falsifiable strategic hypotheses by defining their strategy as an if-then statement. In these statements, the if clause sets out the conditions and the then clause sets out the expected precise results. The more precisely the conditions and results are stated, the more stable and falsifiable the strategy.

Once a company has a strategy, which can be a model of clarity by setting conditions and consequence using if-then statements, Strategic Renaissance refers back to 338 B.C. and introduces the Pivot and the Hammer concept from Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father. Hammer is the place where you decide to concentrate your effort. In this concept, the Hammer is where you mount offense versus your competitors. However, the success of your Hammer depends on the Pivot. The Pivot is where you set up your defense and where you hold the line in order to channel resources into the Hammer. The author reports that when using the Hammer and Pivot concept, companies can generate two kinds of strategic offenses: they can develop hypothesis in which the company's Hammer goes head ...