Strategic Intent by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Vocabulary flashcards covering key strategic concepts, models of competitive innovation, and management orthodoxies discussed in Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's article 'Strategic Intent'.

Strategic Intent

An ambitious obsession with winning and achieving global leadership, sustained over a 10- to 20-year quest, that envisions a desired leadership position and creates an extreme misfit between resources and ambitions.

Traditional Competitor Analysis

An analytical approach focused on existing resources of present competitors—analogous to a snapshot of a moving car—that fails to reveal a competitor's speed, direction, or resourcefulness.

Resourcefulness

The pace at which an organization builds new competitive advantages and leverages limited resources to achieve seemingly unattainable goals.

Strategic Fit

A conventional strategic model emphasizing the matching of current resources to existing opportunities, which often leads companies to trim ambitions rather than leverage resources.

Core Competence

Deeply embedded, cross-business technical capabilities (such as engine manufacturing or electronic imaging) that can be shared and leveraged across multiple product-market units.

Feasibility Sieve

A characteristic of conventional strategic planning where goals are accepted or rejected based on whether managers can be immediately precise about the specific means and milestones.

Corporate Challenges

Intermediate-term, staged focal points—analogous to 400-meter sprints in a marathon—that focus organizational efforts on building specific new competitive advantages.

Quasi Crisis

A sense of urgency created by top management through amplifying weak environmental signals—such as budgeting against an unfavorable exchange rate—to trigger improvement before a real crisis occurs.

Reciprocal Responsibility

A joint commitment of shared pain and shared gain between executive management and frontline workers, necessary for engaging the entire workforce in competitive revitalization.

Competitive Innovation

The art of containing competitive risk by fundamentally changing the rules of engagement and disadvantageous terms set by incumbents, rather than relying on mere imitation.

Building Layers of Advantage

A competitive approach in which an organization steadily accumulates multiple sources of advantage over time, advancing from low factor costs to quality, reliability, and global brand franchises.

Searching for Loose Bricks

A competitive tactic that targets underdefended market segments, niche value-chain activities, or geographic areas just outside an incumbent's orthodox served market to stay below their response threshold.

Changing the Terms of Engagement

A method of competitive innovation where a challenger refuses to accept industry conventions, creating an alternative business model that bypasses entry barriers and turns incumbent strengths into liabilities.

Barriers to Retaliation

Incumbent structural features—such as costly direct sales networks or heavy reliance on existing service revenues—that paralyze an established leader from responding to a challenger without eroding its own profit base.

Competitive Collaboration

The tactical use of joint ventures, outsourcing, and licensing agreements to calibrate competitors, gain market access, hijack rivals' development spending, or fight larger opponents by proxy.

Process of Surrender

A typical sequence of competitive decline characterized by unseen rival intent, underestimated resourcefulness, surprise entry tactics, partial catch-up responses, and eventual market retreat.

Denominator Management

The practice of superficially improving financial ratios, such as return on investment, by cutting capital expenditure, assets, and headcount rather than growing revenue.

Strategy Hierarchy

A traditional organizational model where corporate goals dictate business strategies and functional tactics, creating an elitist separation between strategy formulation at the top and execution below.

Wisdom of the Anthill

The distributed intelligence, problem-solving ability, and frontline ingenuity of employees throughout an entire organization harnessed to achieve operational excellence.

Project A

A 1961 Komatsu corporate program created to advance the product quality of its small- and medium-sized bulldozers above the benchmark set by Caterpillar.

¥180 Program

A 1977 Komatsu initiative that budgeted company-wide operations assuming an exchange rate of 180 yen to the dollar when the actual exchange rate was 240 yen to the dollar.