Strategic Thinking

I am at Vaizag, where I offer a course on Business Strategies and Management Control Systems. The students are busy discussing a Case Study on Indus Towers. I am attempting to make them see the shift in Strategic thinking from the older Confrontational or Zero-Sum approaches to a Collaborative Win/Win Approach. Indus Towers is a collaborative venture that tries to combine the strengths of three companies Airtel, Vodfone and Idea that are otherwise fierce competitors in the marketplace. I want the group to

I see a tendency not merely amongst students at B-Schools, but people in general to form an opinion and look for the facts. Whereas, like Sherlock Holmes, they should be collecting all the facts together and piecing together the Whole Picture before forming their opinion.

The opinion once formed generates a tunnel vision that precludes seeing other relevant facts. A strategic framework built on such an incomplete premise may suffer from serious weaknesses.