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actually put in place. You also learned how strategy is ultimately made. Ultimately,
the best strategies come about when managers are able to balance the needs for
design (planning) with being flexible enough to capitalize on the benefits of
emergence.

EXERCISES
1. What is an intended strategy?
2. What is a realized strategy?

3. Why is it important to understand the difference between intended and
realized strategies?
4. Why is there not a perfect match-up between realized and intended
strategies?
5. What might interfere with the realization of an intended strategy?
6. How might you manage the balance between design and emergence
strategizing processes in an organization?

5.3 Strategy as Trade-Offs, Discipline, and Focus
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Understand the nature of strategic focus.
2. Strategy as trade-offs (Porter).
3. Strategy as discipline (Treacy and Wiersema).
This section helps you understand that a strategy provides a company with
focus. Strategy is ultimately about choice—what the organization does and does not
do. As we’ve seen, vision and mission provide a good sense of direction for the
organization, but they are not meant to serve as, or take the place of, the actual
strategy. Strategy is about choices, and that eventually means making trade-offs such
that the strategy and the firm are distinctive in the eyes of stakeholders. In this
section, you will learn about strategic focus—that is, how trade-offs are reconciled—
as well as two frameworks for thinking about what such focus might entail.
What Is Strategic Focus?
While there are different schools of thought about how strategy comes about,
researchers generally agree that strategic focus is a common characteristic across
successful organizations. Strategic focus is seen when an organization is very clear
about its mission and vision and has a coherent, well-articulated strategy for
achieving those. When a once high-flying firm encounters performance problems, it
is not uncommon to hear business analysts say that the firm’s managers have lost
focus on the customers or markets where they were once highly successful. For
instance, Dell Computer’s strategy is highly focused around the efficient sale and
manufacture of computers and computer peripheral devices. However, during the
mid-2000s, Dell started branching out into other products such as digital cameras,
DVD players, and flat-screen televisions. As a result, it lost focus on its core sales
and manufacturing business, and its performance flagged. As recently as mid-2008,
however, Dell has realized a tremendous turnaround: “We are executing on all points
of our strategy to drive growth in every product category and in every part of the
world,” said a press release from Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. “These results
are early signs of our progress against our five strategic priorities. Through a

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