Dave Shen

Without vision, the planning aspect of strategy is not very useful. Developing the strategy within an organization, can be either top-down, bottom-up, or a mixture of both. At Apple, Steve Jobs provides the strategic vision and Apple develops there strategy top-down — all decision-making and planning comes at the executive level. However in the case of the Mozilla Foundation (creators of the browser Firefox) the strategic vision was to have the developer community design & develop the product (more than 80%) — open-source like manner and they take a more of a bottom-up approach. Google uses a mixture of both where their executive focuses on the advertising business but they allow all employees to offer 20% of work time to develop new products — spawning many products (seen in Google Labs). This is unprecedented but Google allows their engineers to be creative and gives them the time to develop new ideas.

An existing firm will have more a mix of realized strategies that were either deliberate or emergent because they had the experience to deal with the different factors within the industry while an entrant will have realized strategies that predominantly (or all) coming from deliberate/planned strategies — they may be void of strategic learning but it will develop as they progress in the industry space.