Much of this material is based on the work we did with a team of second-year business school students at the Stanford Business School. In our seminar, we discuss strategy in terms of the “consequential” actions that enable an entity to control its destiny.¹ This requires a certain degree of “paranoia” ² on the part of that entity about its dependency on forces that affect its destiny. If that dependency evolves to exceed the entity’s capacity to influence those forces, strategic subordination is the likely unfavorable result. Especially dangerous are situations with nonlinear dynamics; that is, when each round of interaction with the forces simultaneously increases proportionally more than the entity’s dependency and reduces its capacity to influence those forces, making it increasingly difficult to turn the situation around.³

We applied this thinking to the energy situation facing the United States.⁴ Based on our own and our students’ analyses, we worked up the accompanying analyses, which highlight the “strategic inflection point” ⁵ that the country now faces, offers a plan for addressing it, and defines a “minimum winning game.” ⁶

The accompanying article incorporates the contributions of the students in the 2008 Bass seminar at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Special thanks go to Debra Schifrin, our research associate.

¹ Robert A. Burgelman, Strategy is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future , New York, NY: Free Press, 2002.

² Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company, New York, NY: Doubleday, 1996.

³ Robert A. Burgelman and Andrew S. Grove, “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos—repeatedly: Managing strategic dynamics for corporate longevity,” Strategic Management Journal, 2007, Volume 28, pp. 965–79.

⁴ Andrew S. Grove, Robert A. Burgelman, and Debra Schifrin, “US dependence on oil in 2008 and beyond: Facts, figures and context,” Stanford Business School research paper series number 1997, September 2008.

⁵ The SIP concept and the framework matching “what it takes to win” with “what we have,” and “what we say” with “what we do,” are further elaborated in Robert A. Burgelman and Andrew S. Grove, “Strategic dissonance,” California Management Review, 1996, Volume 38, Number 2, pp. 8–28.

⁶ The first minimum winning game is limited enough to be won with the available resources within the short- to medium-term, and sufficiently large enough so that winning it provides a foundation for the next, more difficult result on the way to achieving the long-term strategic goal. See Robert A. Burgelman and Robert E. Siegel, “Defining the mini-mum winning game in high-technology ventures,” California Management Review, 2007, Volume 49, Number 3, pp. 6–26.

Back to top