Creating strategy by design

Although thousands of books and articles have been written on organizational strategy, there is very little that can be used to help us actually create or generate organizational strategy. Gary Hamel (1998, p. 3) was correct when he said, “Anyone who claims to be a strategist should be intensely embarrassed by the fact that the strategy industry doesn’t have a theory of strategy creation!” Almost 20 years later, the strategy industry still has no widely accepted theory, methods or tools for strategy creation … until now. In this paper I illustrate how to use many of the principles, processes and tools of the design profession to create innovative organizational strategies that can help organizations stand out from the pack.