Do you aspire to have a strategy?

I listened to a piece on the radio earlier today about the UK’s electricity generation strategy, or lack of it. One expert’s view was that we had a strategy in the sense of an aspiration but we had no plan. Although I understand what she meant in relation to energy policy, we need to be much clearer in relation to strategy itself because we mustn’t think of it as “aspiration” at all if we want to come up something useful.

It’s hard teaching strategy, particularly to anyone without much work experience, because they generally have no conception of what it is and nothing much we can relate it to. One route is to consider what strategy is not and “aspiration” is one of the things on the “not” list.

Why are you reading this?

I’m gradually working my way through a reading list from Ha-Joon Chang, reader in Economics at Cambridge, which was promoted by Heffers bookshop last summer. It’s an odd time to take up reading about economics as it is a discipline under some pressure at the moment. Behavioural economics has for a while been eating away at the rationalist principles underlying much of micro-economics. More recently the financial crash and subsequent recession continue to challenge macro-economics. I decided it was time to explore how thinkers in this field are responding to the challenges and remedy my own ignorance at the same time.