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Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.
Albert Einstein

Strategy is a set of activities to have competitive advantage to achieve the mission of company.
However, a topic has been discussed for long time that is strategy is more art or science?
In Professor Freedmans new book Strategy, he believes To win in war, in business or in sport
requires a strategy. That doesnt mean you need a plan, you need flexibility. In this chaotic
world, it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It
the one that the most adaptable to change a great quote of Darwin can be also applied into
economic perspective. The flexibility and adaptation normally is created by the creativity. In
additional, Freedman adds that success strategy depend on the expectation from the management
created by their imaginations, not plan. The great Prussian field marshal von Moltke also support
this idea that No plan survives contact with the enemy. However, this may lead to different
outcome compared to the plan because the strategy is adjusted to suitable with the environment.
As Freedman says, The point about good strategy is not that it follows a formula but that it
draws on a shrewd understanding of the possibilities inherent in the circumstances of the moment
and how they might be realised. Those opinions clearly states the reason HP failed is that they
are too rigid to adapt the change of environment which created a large amount of financial loss.
On the other hand, Markus Granlund believes that successful strategy work requires analytical
and participatory planning, implementation that creates commitment, and long-term monitoring.
After conducting many research, he made a conclusion that strategic should not be an abstract
sketch, which is created by the top management but instead, should be something that is clear
and everyone could create and implement. He illustrates that by using SWOT as a tool to
analysis the strengths of other competitors, company can realize the problem within itself in
order to have corrective actions to earn their competitive advantage in the tough market. What an
opposite opinion with Freedman!

However, in my opinion, strategy is more about the art rather science but the science cannot be
underestimated which is fundamental factor of successful strategy. Strategy should be applied in
this way, which focus on creating solid analysis first and after that the top management put
creative decisions to create better outcome. eBay is applied this approach to enhance the business
performance and the employee satisfaction.
Marc Emmer also support this idea by pointed out that the art and science argument has been
made before, most notably by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. This point of view indicates
that companies could become paralyzed in data while over focus on analysing, which can destroy
the creativity. The science somehow limits our potential capacity and the artistic approach can
solve this problem by using the creativity to connect to the future to dream bigger and achieve
more. Albert Einstein said, Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is
limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all
there ever will be to know and understand.Dr. Brodie also has the same idea that scientific
method is useful and is being used in exploring alternatives but not in making the final choice.
The final choice should be based on the good judgment, which created by the personal intuition
whose approach to their work as an artist, not the scientist.
Pearl Zhus point of view can be used to conclude that strategy is the art of executive decisionmaking and science of step-by-step actions. The best strategists are artistic scientist or scientific
artist.
Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
Leonardo da Vinci

Reference Link
http://www.stellarleadership.com/leadership-blog/348-strategy-is-art-andscience.html
http://www.utu.fi/en/units/tse/about/cases/Pages/deans-greeting-strategywork-2013.aspx

http://blog.vistage.com/business-strategy-and-management/strategy-artscience/
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/theorists/brodie1.htm
http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2014/06/is-strategy-more-art-or-science.html