Re-orienting competitive strategy with a “double-diamond” model of strategy (competences, customers, competitors + environment) + change (goals/policies, culture, leadership + structure/systems).

The ability to define and guide the activities which turn the inputs to a business into outputs is the essence of management.  At one extreme, these activities are manageable on a day-to-day basis, with managers responding to problems and minor changes in operating conditions; this is operations management.  At the other extreme are management decisions that will launch the firm on a trajectory that is expected to continue for a number of years. The long-term character of these decisions is what makes them ‘strategic’. The notion of a firm’s distinctive or core competence (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) is used here as the anchor to develop an analytical framework–the strategic “double diamond”–that can provide a useful structure for considering fundamental strategic issues about competition.