A brief definition of strategy

This month's Harvard Business Review features an article (free link) by Joseph Bower of Harvard Business School and Clark Gilbert of Brigham Young University Idaho on corporate strategy. There's so much good stuff in the article that it will take two or three posts to note the key points.

So, to start off with, I wanted to share their working definition of strategy, which is so straightforward and simple that I initially thought it had to be incorrect. Yet the more I've thought about it, the better I like it. So here goes:

[Strategy is] deciding which opportunities a company will pursue and which it will pass by.

That's it. Nice, eh?

strategy, Harvard Business Review