09-14-2026
In strategic management, the hardest problems are often not about missing data — they are about not knowing what, exactly, you are solving for. Naming the puzzle, notes Sandip Bisui, is the first step, followed by applying lenses to the circumstances that will help leadership to "stop arguing past each other and start debating the same question."
Bisui, together with co-editors Leonardo M. Klüppel, Michael J. Leiblein and Jeffrey Reuer, set out to build the guide Bisui says he wished he’d had during his own PhD. A Guide to Key Theories for Strategic Management grew out of something close to a doctoral-seminar reading list, walking through the field’s major theories, their assumptions, mechanisms and boundary conditions. It’s less a management how-to book, Bisui says, and more a foundational map of the field — though the theories inside speak directly to practice, too, as they trace out the major perspectives of strategy.
Most of the hard calls managers face, Bisui says, aren’t really about missing information — they’re about not having a clear name for the problem in front of them. “Should we build this capability ourselves or partner for it? Is a competitor’s move a real threat or just noise? Should we wait, or commit now?” Each of the 15 chapters in the book gives managers a precise lens for these recurring puzzles: resource allocation, governance choices, timing decisions under uncertainty and how attention gets allocated inside an organization. Once the puzzle has a name, the conversation at the table changes.
Bisui points to situations where combining theories can change the picture entirely. For example, take any partner-or-buy decision, like an alliance or acquisition. The resource-based view tells you whether the other side actually has something valuable; transaction cost economics tells you how to govern the deal; and real options theory tells you how to stage your commitments so you’re not locked in too early. Information economics — Bisui’s own primary research area — addresses another major source of uncertainty: “the other side almost always knows more about what they’re bringing to the table than you do, and that information asymmetry is exactly what leads to adverse selection — the partners and targets can have a true value that is weaker than it might appear and end up overpaying for the deal.” That’s why so much of deal design is really about allocating risks, costs and payments to improve efficiency. Put together, Bisui says, these theories don’t just add detail — they change what question you think you’re answering.
Another good example, Bisui says, is how a firm reacts to a decline in performance. Prospect theory and the behavioral theory of the firm both show that once managers frame a situation as a loss relative to some reference point, such as a missed target, they become far more willing to take risks than when the same situation is framed as a chance to gain.
“Two firms with identical numbers can make opposite decisions purely because of how the problem was framed internally,” he says. Chapters on the attention-based view, prospect theory and cognitive aspects of strategic decision-making help managers notice when this is happening in their own organization — not to eliminate framing, since that’s unavoidable, but so they can ask: “What reference point are we actually using here, and is it the right one?”
Any time a decision has more than one plausible driver, Bisui says, it’s worth pausing and asking which theory actually applies. A classic challenge is "why isn’t this restructuring changing behavior the way we expected?" It could be a transaction-cost problem, an attention problem or plain behavioral inertia — and each explanation points to a different fix. Another is market-entry timing: is this a first-mover-advantage situation, best explained through game theory, or is it better thought of as an option worth keeping alive until the uncertainty resolves?
“The book doesn’t tell managers which theory is correct,” Bisui says. “It gives them each theory’s foundations and boundary conditions to make that judgment call themselves, deliberately, instead of defaulting to whichever framework they learned first.”
“Our hope,” Bisui says, “is less that readers memorize 15 new frameworks, and more that they get better at knowing when a favorite tool doesn’t apply and others might be marshalled.”
A lot of strategy advice fails not because the framework is wrong, but because it’s used outside the conditions it was built for. After going through the theories and chapter summaries, he’d like practitioners to look at a strategy consultant’s slide, recognize which underlying theory it’s really drawing on, and ask a sharper question: does the logic behind this tool really hold in this specific situation? “That’s a more durable skill than knowing more frameworks,” he says. “It’s knowing how to choose among them.”
