Page 5 - PRAGMATIC STRATEGY

Purpose and Features

The second decade of the second millennium was marked by
unprecedented business opportunities and threats. It was a landscape

typified by increasing organisational complexity and diversity where
mergers, takeovers, management-buyouts, corporate corruption, births
and deaths colour the canvass as companies expand and grow or
delayer and downsize allowing little job security at any level of the

organisation.

This book has been designed to address and answer the pertinent

issues and questions that arise during the course of business in the
unfolding millennium. However, it does not attempt to provide a
panacea for business and its managers. Rather, it tries to debunk the

prescriptive nature of business theory as portrayed by other business
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textbooks and writers in the last decades of the 20 century. In
essence, it aims to lead the reader through the application and use of

theory as applied in the real world by real companies through
examination of business case studies and cameo case studies. The
book’s beliefs and objectives are rooted in the recognition of the

indomitable flexibility, adaptability, and opportunistic nature of the
human spirit and how this manifested in the actions and problem
solving that has populated the matrix of the business environment in
the last decade or two.

Many current text books have, in their evolving editions, developed a
tendency to over-intellectualise their content, to become all things to all
readers. The result is that students and lecturers use the text book as a

resource to dip into for specific elements and issues often, in the
process, losing sight of the holistic and inter-relatedness of the subject
area itself, in a sense seeing the trees rather than the wood. To some

extent this may be explained in simple terms where strategy text books
are either designed to provide a holistic, roadmap approach to the