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through the application of the strategy diamond to the task of developing your
personal strategy.
The Strategy Diamond
All organizations have strategies. The real question for a business is not

whether it has a strategy but rather whether its strategy is effective or ineffective, and
whether the elements of the strategy are chosen by managers, luck, or by default. You
have probably heard the saying, “luck is a matter of being in the right place at the
right time”—well, the key to making sure you are in the right place at the right time
is preparation, and in many ways, strategizing provides that type of preparation. Luck
is not a bad thing. The challenge is to recognize luck when you see it, capitalize on
luck, and put the organization repeatedly in luck’s path.
The strategy diamond was developed by strategy researchers Don Hambrick
and Jim Fredrickson as a framework for checking and communicating a
strategy. You have already learned in this chapter about the need for focus and
[1]
choice with strategy, but you might also have noticed that generic strategies and
value disciplines do not spell out a strategy’s ingredients. In critiquing the field of
strategy, these researchers noted that “after more than 30 years of hard thinking about
strategy, consultants and scholars have provided executives with an abundance of
frameworks for analyzing strategic situations.…Missing, however, has been any
guidance as to what the product of these tools should be—or what actually constitutes
a strategy.”
[2]
Figure 5.17 The Strategy Diamond

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