This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Capturing new growth opportunities is fundamental to strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. These days, experimentation and improvisational change are in. But how should managers address the challenge? The answer, the authors argue, can be more complex and more crucial to a company's success than previously thought. Their research on mature corporations, growing businesses and new ventures suggests a paradoxical tension between focus and flexibility that can define or break a business. Based on more than 150 interviews with managers at 30 companies in North America, Europe and Asia, the authors conclude that focus is still critical and may be just as important as flexibility. What's more, they conclude that a company's focus may influence its flexibility and vice versa. There are two components to capturing a new business opportunity: opportunity selection and opportunity execution. Opportunity selection involves determining which customer problem to solve, whereas opportunity execution deals with solving the problem. The authors point out that most books, articles and thought leaders focus on opportunity execution -how to create value by developing solutions. But research suggests that innovation initiatives often move so quickly to identify a solution that the innovators have to cycle back to figure out which problem they are actually solving. The authors found that opportunity selection appears to matter as much as opportunity execution. More importantly, how managers approach opportunity selection (whether with flexibility or with focus) has a critical impact on how successful they are at opportunity execution. The authors observed that managers and entrepreneurs tend to fall into two groups: opportunists and strategists. Opportunists rely on a less scripted and more flexible approach to opportunity selection, letting emergent customer inquiries shape opportunity selection.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Markets are changing, competition is shifting, and businesses may be suffering or perhaps thriving. Whatever the immediate circumstances, corporate managers ask the same questions: where do we go from here, and which strategy will get us there? To understand how to choose the right strategy at the right time, the authors analyzed the logic of the leading strategic frameworks used in business and engineering schools around the world. They matched those frameworks with the key strategic choices faced by dozens of industry leaders at different times, during periods of stability and of change. Two insights emerged from their analysis. First, the frameworks divided into three archetypes: strategies of position, strategies of leverage, and strategies of opportunity. What's right for a company depends on its circumstances, its available resources, and how management combines those resources. Second, many of the assumptions about competitive advantage didn't hold. For example, although strategy gurus talk about strategically valuable resources, sometimes competitive advantage came from very ordinary resources assembled well. To figure out when it makes sense to pursue strategies of position, leverage, or opportunity, the authors advise managers to understand their company's immediate circumstances, take stock of their current resources, and determine the relationships among the various resources. Understanding these factors, they argue, will help managers select the right strategic framework.