Strategy tetrad for evaluating strategic choice

Abstract

Evaluating business strategies is a neglected research area in strategic management literature. This might be caused by the fact that there are at least three essential reasons why evaluation is so hard: new strategies are created to replace old ones, so strategies “must” be better; benchmarking strategy with competitors’ strategies leads to mediocrity, and you can only be sure of success after the fact. This paper first reviews literature to find the most common ways to evaluate strategies and then synthesizes these approaches in a model called Strategy Tetrad. The model is then applied to three companies in the mobile phone industry to test it. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Strategy Tetrad allows us to get deeper insights of the competitive advantage and, maybe even more importantly, the pitfalls that the strategy imposes onto the company.