Abstract

Today's executive is having difficulty sorting out sound from faulty assumptions. The tried and traditional approaches which were so successful for developing corporate strategies in the past have become problematic. One still must depend on information and theories of the business when arriving at any decision, but the task of choosing the soundest information and theory has become more difficult. On what basis should the executive make this choice? This question is most challenging when it comes to deciding on a corporate strategy. The difficulty with strategic decisions is that they are the least structured of all the choices an executive must make. Strategy has the fewest concrete referent points in reality because strategy is a question of being. This article describes a process several different organizations have used to get a better grasp on the realities their executives face. The process involves surfacing underlying assumptions, critically examining them and making informed judgments on them.