Roger Martin: evaluation

Transcript context

…On this point, you made about how schools are teaching strategy wrong, how do you describe what the wrong approach is? It's a theory that's sort of taken over, called the resource-based view of the firm, that was... In the world of academics, there's a weird place where the number one emotion is jealousy, and people were massively jealous of Mike Porter, who created many of the most important concepts of strategy when he wrote a book, Competitive Strategy, in 1980. And so, they needed to counter him because they just didn't like the fact that he was so prominent, and they decided they would say he was about positioning. So, they called his the positioning school, and they caricatured what he said, which he never did, but they said he said it's all about finding a place that is structurally attractive, and then milking it for everything you can. We at the resource-based view of the firm think that strategy is all about building resources. And if you build resources, it's almost like if you build it, they will come. And that's what you should pay attention to. Now, the problem is, any resource that may be useful somewhere is not necessarily useful elsewhere. So, it begs the question, how would you think through what resources to invest in building? What would be a way of doing that, investing here, versus here, versus here? It's silent on that because it's a dumb theory, and it doesn't have anything useful to say, in my view, about that. And so, when the students go out and say to their company, I'm going to do a VRIO analysis, or a VRIN, some people just roll their eyes at them, and so it doesn't get used. I've only seen it used, I've been in consulting companies for 42 years, and I've seen it used once. And the trust, as is usually the case, is that it's both. And that's why the model I use for strategies says a lot about where you play is important, that's one of the key questions, and your capabilities are important, and you've got to link those things together. But that's, for the most part in the leading business schools, it's illegal to teach that. Illegal to teach your approach.…

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