Future power: The Control of corporate strategy;

              Future Power: The Control of Corporate Strategy,/
by KENNETH R. ANDREWS/Editor, Harvard Business Review
Future shock" is Alvin Toffler's famous phrase tor the malady afflicting those who are par-alyzed by the prospect of change. For business, the cure is management confidence in its powers and its adaptability to sudden changes of fortune. The control that executives exert over the development of their companies might, in turn, be labeled "future power."
I contend that managers of any corporation can move into the future in full command of their faculties-alert, calm, and unshockable—and their businesses. Hysterical forboding may be the province of anti-nuclear environmentalists and nervous journalists, but not of managers.
The word strategy has attained a certain vogue these days. It often is applied to the functions within a company, as in marketing, manufac-turing, or research and development strategy. It also appears as a designa-tion for organizational entities, as in strategic business units. But corporate strategy is the most comprehensive term, for it purports to embrace actions of the total company rather than mere economic decisions. The common element is a choice of goals
and a program to attain them.
The widespread use of the term strategy may be an attempt to label age-old management skills with a marketable, and chic, new jargon. For the word has been accompanied by a new set of planning tools that evaluate alternatives, govern invest-ment choices, allocate resources among opportunities, and decide on diversification or divestment. Portfolio analysis, matrices for the classification of businesses by market share and growth prospects, and models, mathematical and otherwise, have been devised to embody as-sumptions and to produce detailed projections. With the aid of such tools it is possible to construct pro forma operating statements and balance sheets to reflect an almost infinite combination of assump-tions-made up, if you will, of whole cloth by using the computer rather than the spinning wheel. In myriad what-if calculations, the tools for strategic decision-making sometimes overwhelm the simple purpose they are to serve.
The simple but powerful idea that can help determine the future starts with the proposition that every
company, like every family or individual, should have a set of purposes to guide its progress in a chosen direction. Preparing for an uncertain future begins with clari-fying what we can know and deciding what we want to have happen.
A Definition
This, then, defines corporate strat-egy. It is the pattern of a com-pany's decisions that determines its objectives, that decides how to achieve those goals, and that defines the company's range of business, the kind of economic and human organi-zation it is, and the nature of the contribution it intends to make to shareholders, employees, customers, and communities. In a changing world, it helps to limit certain new activities, while focussing attention on others.
The pattern that results from a series of strategic decisions will define the character of a company and the position it will occupy in its industry and its markets. Some aspects of this pattern, such as a commitment to quality, high tech-nology, certain raw materials, or
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