Judgment and Strategy

Holt argues strategy is the process by which an organization presents itself to itself and others. To bring this about exponents of strategic inquiry attempt t gather knowledge about the conditions in which any organization is being organized: emerging markets, restless geo-political environments, networks of technological ordering, populations with differing skill sets, and the like. The upshot of such inquiry is a succession of images by which an organization attains distinction as a unity, or 'self'. Using work from literature, art, and philosophy, Holt explores what it means to present such an organizational 'self'. In strategy practice, he identifies three related forms of presentation. First comes strategy as a project of representational knowledge. Here strategists generate accurate, timely, and complex information to build successive images of the organization and its place in the world. Though pervasive and persistent, these overtly technical images remain subject to the basic skeptical challenge that things could be otherwise. In response, come the second and third forms of self presentation: the creation of visionary images, or assertions of competitive brute will. Here