Author(s): Yasunori Ushiyama
A philosophy is the purpose of management. Strategy is summed up in objectives. The thesis that strategy is meaningless because it is relative has been present. Even if the strategy was relative, it may have been merely to focus on the details of the strategy. It may be unreasonable to consider the strategy meaningless simply because it is inconsistent and varying. What is most important in examining strategies is to consider what strategic objectives each company has. In the traditional analysis of strategy, classifying companies by focusing on their characteristics, and not on their business objectives, has been dominant. This causes a serious problem because it does not allow us to identify what is taking place with an overview of the strategies from the macroscopic perspective. In order to solve this problem, we selected companies for which we could obtain 2007 data from the book Mission, published about 10 years ago, which contains management philosophies and behavioral guidelines of 983 blue-chip companies in Japan, to compare them to their sales data of 2017. We analyzed the 724 companies for which the relevant data were obtainable. Of the strategic elements selected from the collection of business philosophies, we found that the most outstanding business objectives and strategic elements set forth by the high growth companies were (1) to challenge new markets and (2) to put the customer first. Although other previous studies considered important the customer satisfaction as the business objective, we did not find the companies with the emphasis on the customer satisfaction to have a high growth by two-group comparison.