Chapter Seventeen. Base Your Strategy on the Situation, Not on a Formula

Sometime in 1977, I took Peter’s class in “Policy”—an academic misnomer which I still don’t like. To me, policy is a rule an organization has as a guide for decision making. So a retailer has a policy of “no returns after thirty days,” or a company has a policy of an annual salary review, or another that “the customer is job number one.” What academics generally term “policy” is really “strategy.” Strategy is what a company plans to do to reach a goal or objective. Drucker actually taught strategy, not policy, and I believe that most of the academic courses of this type would be better described as strategy, which is what they are really about.

In Drucker’s classroom, during ...

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