Crafting & Executing Strategy:

Concepts and Cases - eBook PDF

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebooksecure.com/download/crafting-executing-strategy-concepts-and-cases-e
book-pdf/
CRAFTING AND
EXECUTING STRATEGY
The Quest for Competitive Advantage

Concepts and Cases

 CRAFTING AND
EXECUTING STRATEGY
The Quest for Competitive Advantage

Concepts and Cases | 22ND EDITION

Arthur A. Thompson Margaret A. Peteraf

The University of Alabama Dartmouth College

John E. Gamble A.J. Strickland III

Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi The University of Alabama
 Final PDF to printer

CRAFTING & EXECUTING STRATEGY: CONCEPTS AND CASES

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2020 by McGraw-Hill
Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without
the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but not limited to, in any network or other
electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.
Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside
the United States.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 LWI 22 21 20 19
ISBN 978-1-260-56574-4
MHID 1-260-56574-2

All credits appearing on page or at the end of the book are considered to be an extension of the copyright
page.
The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website
does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education
does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.

mheducation.com/highered

tho65742_fm_ise.indd iv 12/11/18 12:52 PM

To our families and especially our spouses:
Hasseline, Paul, Heather, and Kitty.
 About the Authors

Arthur A. Thompson, Jr., earned his BS and PhD degrees in economics from The
University of Tennessee, spent three years on the economics faculty at Virginia Tech, and
served on the faculty of The University of Alabama’s College of Commerce and Business
Administration for 24 years. In 1974 and again in 1982, Dr. Thompson spent semester-long
sabbaticals as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School.
His areas of specialization are business strategy, competition and market analysis, and
the economics of business enterprises. In addition to publishing over 30 articles in some
25 ­different professional and trade publications, he has authored or co-authored five ­textbooks
and six computer-based simulation exercises. His textbooks and strategy simulations have
been used at well over 1,000 college and university campuses worldwide.
Dr. Thompson and his wife of 58 years have two daughters, two grandchildren, and a
Yorkshire Terrier.

Margaret A. Peteraf is the Leon E. Williams Professor of Management Emerita at the

Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. She is an internationally recognized scholar
of strategic management, with a long list of publications in top management journals. She
has earned myriad honors and prizes for her contributions, including the 1999 Strategic
Management Society Best Paper Award recognizing the deep influence of her work on the
field of Strategic Management. Professor Peteraf is a fellow of the Strategic Management
Society and the Academy of Management. She served previously as a member of the Board
of Governors of both the Society and the Academy of Management and as Chair of the
Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy. She has also served in various edito-
rial roles and on numerous editorial boards, including the Strategic Management Journal,
the Academy of Management Review, and Organization Science. She has taught in Executive
Education programs in various programs around the world and has won teaching awards at
the MBA and Executive level.
Professor Peteraf earned her PhD, MA, and MPhil at Yale University and held previous
faculty appointments at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Manage-
ment and at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

vi
John E. Gamble is a Professor of Management and Dean of the College of Business at
Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. His teaching and research for more than 20 years
has focused on strategic management at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has
conducted courses in strategic management in Germany since 2001, which have been spon-
sored by the University of Applied Sciences in Worms.
Dr. Gamble’s research has been published in various scholarly journals and he is the
author or co-author of more than 75 case studies published in an assortment of strategic
management and strategic marketing texts. He has done consulting on industry and market
analysis for clients in a diverse mix of industries.
Professor Gamble received his PhD, MA, and BS degrees from The University of Alabama
and was a faculty member in the Mitchell College of Business at the University of South
Alabama before his appointment to the faculty at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

Dr. A. J. (Lonnie) Strickland is the Thomas R. Miller Professor of Strategic Manage-

ment at the Culverhouse School of Business at The University of Alabama. He is a native
of north Georgia, and attended the University of Georgia, where he received a BS degree
in math and physics; Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received an MS in indus-
trial management; and Georgia State University, where he received his PhD in business
administration.
Lonnie’s experience in consulting and executive development is in the strategic manage-
ment arena, with a concentration in industry and competitive analysis. He has developed
strategic planning systems for numerous firms all over the world. He served as Director
of Marketing and Strategy at BellSouth, has taken two companies to the New York Stock
Exchange, is one of the founders and directors of American Equity Investment Life Holding
(AEL), and serves on numerous boards of directors. He is a very popular speaker in the area
of strategic management.
Lonnie and his wife, Kitty, have been married for over 49 years. They have two children
and two grandchildren. Each summer, Lonnie and his wife live on their private game reserve
in South Africa where they enjoy taking their friends on safaris.
 Preface

B
y offering the most engaging, clearly articulated, and conceptually sound text on
strategic management, Crafting and Executing Strategy has been able to maintain
its position as the leading textbook in strategic management for over 30 years.
With this latest edition, we build on this strong foundation, maintaining the attributes
of the book that have long made it the most teachable text on the market, while updat-
ing the content, sharpening its presentation, and providing enlightening new illustra-
tions and examples.
The distinguishing mark of the 22nd edition is its enriched and enlivened presenta-
tion of the material in each of the 12 chapters, providing an as up-to-date and ­engrossing
discussion of the core concepts and analytical tools as you will find anywhere. As with
each of our new editions, there is an accompanying lineup of exciting new cases that
bring the content to life and are sure to provoke interesting classroom discussions,
deepening students’ understanding of the material in the process.
While this 22nd edition retains the 12-chapter structure of the prior edition, every
chapter—indeed every paragraph and every line—has been reexamined, refined, and
refreshed. New content has been added to keep the material in line with the latest devel-
opments in the theory and practice of strategic management. In other areas, coverage
has been trimmed to keep the book at a more manageable size. Scores of new examples
have been added, along with 16 new Illustration Capsules, to enrich understanding of
the content and to provide students with a ringside view of strategy in action. The result
is a text that cuts straight to the chase in terms of what students really need to know
and gives instructors a leg up on teaching that material effectively. It remains, as always,
solidly mainstream and balanced, mirroring both the penetrating insight of academic
thought and the pragmatism of real-world strategic management.
A standout feature of this text has always been the tight linkage between the content
of the chapters and the cases. The lineup of cases that accompany the 22nd edition is
outstanding in this respect—a truly appealing mix of strategically relevant and thought-
fully crafted cases, certain to engage students and sharpen their skills in applying the
concepts and tools of strategic analysis. Many involve high-profile companies that
the students will immediately recognize and relate to; all are framed around key strate-
gic issues and serve to add depth and context to the topical content of the chapters. We
are confident you will be impressed with how well these cases work in the classroom
and the amount of student interest they will spark.
For some years now, growing numbers of strategy instructors at business
schools worldwide have been transitioning from a purely text-case course struc-
ture to a more robust and energizing text-case-simulation course structure. Incorpo-
rating a competition-based strategy simulation has the strong appeal of providing
class members with an immediate and engaging opportunity to apply the concepts
and ­analytical tools covered in the chapters and to become personally involved in craft-
ing and executing a strategy for a virtual company that they have been assigned to

viii
manage and that competes head-to-head with companies run by other class members.
Two widely used and pedagogically effective online strategy simulations, The Busi-
ness Strategy Game and GLO-BUS, are optional companions for this text. Both
­simulations were created by Arthur Thompson, one of the text authors, and, like
the cases, are closely linked to the content of each chapter in the text. The Exer-
cises for Simulation ­Participants, found at the end of each chapter, provide clear
guidance to class members in applying the concepts and analytical tools covered in
the chapters to the issues and decisions that they have to wrestle with in managing
their simulation company.
To assist instructors in assessing student achievement of program learning objec-
tives, in line with AACSB requirements, the 22nd edition includes a set of Assurance
of Learning Exercises at the end of each chapter that link to the specific learning objec-
tives appearing at the beginning of each chapter and highlighted throughout the text. An
important instructional feature of the 22nd edition is its more closely integrated linkage
of selected chapter-end Assurance of Learning Exercises and cases to the publisher’s
web-based assignment and assessment platform called Connect™. Your students will
be able to use the online Connect™ supplement to (1) complete selected Assurance
of Learning Exercises appearing at the end of each of the 12 ­chapters, (2) complete
chapter-end quizzes, and (3) enter their answers to a number of the suggested assign-
ment questions for 14 of the 32 cases in this edition. The analysis portion of the
­Connect™ exercises is ­automatically graded, thereby enabling you to easily assess
the learning that has occurred.
In addition, both of the companion strategy simulations have a built-in Learning
Assurance Report that quantifies how well each member of your class performed on
nine skills/learning measures versus tens of thousands of other students worldwide who
completed the simulation in the past 12 months. We believe the chapter-end Assur-
ance of Learning Exercises, the all-new online and automatically graded Connect™
exercises, and the Learning Assurance Report generated at the conclusion of The Busi-
ness Strategy Game and GLO-BUS simulations provide you with easy-to-use, empirical
measures of student learning in your course. All can be used in conjunction with other
instructor-developed or school-developed scoring rubrics and assessment tools to com-
prehensively evaluate course or program learning outcomes and measure compliance
with AACSB accreditation standards.
Taken together, the various components of the 22nd edition package and the sup-
porting set of instructor resources provide you with enormous course design flexibility
and a powerful kit of teaching/learning tools. We’ve done our very best to ensure that
the elements constituting the 22nd edition will work well for you in the classroom,
help you economize on the time needed to be well prepared for each class, and cause
students to conclude that your course is one of the very best they have ever taken—from
the standpoint of both enjoyment and learning.
x PREFACE

DIFFERENTIATING FEATURES OF THE 22ND EDITION

Eight standout features strongly differentiate this text and the accompanying instruc-
tional package from others in the field:
1. Our integrated coverage of the two most popular perspectives on strategic ­management—
positioning theory and resource-based theory—is unsurpassed by any other leading
strategy text. Principles and concepts from both the positioning perspective and
the resource-based perspective are prominently and comprehensively integrated
into our coverage of crafting both single-business and multibusiness strategies.
By highlighting the relationship between a firm’s resources and capabilities to
the activities it conducts along its value chain, we show explicitly how these
two perspectives relate to one another. Moreover, in Chapters 3 through 8 it is
emphasized repeatedly that a company’s strategy must be matched not only to its
external market circumstances but also to its internal resources and competitive
capabilities.
2. With this new edition, we provide the clearest, easiest to understand presentation of the
value-price-cost framework. In recent years, this framework has become an essential
aid to teaching students how companies create economic value in the course of
conducting business. We show how this simple framework informs the concept
of the business model as well as the all-important concept of competitive advan-
tage. In Chapter 5, we add further clarity by showing in pictorial fashion how the
value-price-cost framework relates to the different sources of competitive advantage
that underlie the five generic strategies.
3. Our coverage of cooperative strategies and the role that interorganizational activity
can play in the pursuit of competitive advantage is similarly distinguished. The top-
ics of the value net, ecosystems, strategic alliances, licensing, joint ventures, and
other types of collaborative relationships are featured prominently in a number of
chapters and are integrated into other material throughout the text. We show how
strategies of this nature can contribute to the success of single-business companies
as well as multibusiness enterprises, whether with respect to firms operating in
domestic markets or those operating in the international realm.
4. The attention we give to international strategies, in all their dimensions, make this text-
book an indispensable aid to understanding strategy formulation and execution in an
increasingly connected, global world. Our treatment of this topic as one of the most
critical elements of the scope of a company’s activities brings home to students the
connection between the topic of international strategy with other topics concern-
ing firm scope, such as multibusiness (or corporate) strategy, outsourcing, insourc-
ing, and vertical integration.
5. With a standalone chapter devoted to these topics, our coverage of business ethics,
­corporate social responsibility, and environmental sustainability goes well beyond that
offered by any other leading strategy text. Chapter 9, “Ethics, Corporate Social
Responsibility, Environmental Sustainability, and Strategy,” fulfills the important
functions of (1) alerting students to the role and importance of ethical and socially
responsible decision making and (2) addressing the accreditation requirement of
the AACSB International that business ethics be visibly and thoroughly embedded
in the core curriculum. Moreover, discussions of the roles of values and ethics
are integrated into portions of other chapters, beginning with the first chapter,
to further reinforce why and how considerations relating to ethics, values, social
 PREFACE xi

responsibility, and sustainability should figure prominently into the managerial

task of crafting and executing company strategies.
6. Long known as an important differentiator of this text, the case collection in the
22nd edition is truly unrivaled from the standpoints of student appeal, teachabil-
ity, and suitability for drilling students in the use of the concepts and analytical
treatments in Chapters 1 through 12. The 32 cases included in this edition are
the very latest, the best, and the most on target that we could find. The ample
information about the cases in the Instructor’s Manual makes it effortless to
select a set of cases each term that will capture the interest of students from
start to finish.
7. The text is now more tightly linked to the publisher’s trailblazing web-based assignment
and assessment platform called Connect™. This will enable professors to gauge class
members’ prowess in accurately completing (a) selected chapter-end exercises,
(b) chapter-end quizzes, and (c) the creative author-developed exercises for seven
of the cases in this edition.
8. Two cutting-edge and widely used strategy simulations—The Business Strategy Game and
GLO-BUS—are optional companions to the 22nd edition. These give you an unmatched
capability to employ a text-case-simulation model of course delivery.

ORGANIZATION, CONTENT, AND FEATURES OF THE

22ND-EDITION TEXT CHAPTERS
• Chapter 1 serves as a brief, general introduction to the topic of strategy, focusing
on the central questions of “What is strategy?” and “Why is it important?” As such,
it serves as the perfect accompaniment for your opening-day lecture on what the
course is all about and why it matters. Using the newly added example of Apple,
Inc., to drive home the concepts in this chapter, we introduce students to what we
mean by “competitive advantage” and the key features of business-level strategy.
Describing strategy making as a process, we explain why a company’s strategy is
partly planned and partly reactive and why a strategy tends to co-evolve with its
environment over time. We discuss the importance of ethics in choosing among
strategic alternatives and introduce the concept of a business model. We show that
a viable business model must provide both an attractive value proposition for the
company’s customers and a formula for making profits for the company. A key
feature of this chapter is a depiction of how the value-price-cost framework can be
used to frame this discussion.We show how the mark of a winning strategy is its
ability to pass three tests: (1) the fit test (for internal and external fit), (2) the com-
petitive advantage test, and (3) the performance test. And we explain why good com-
pany performance depends not only upon a sound strategy but upon solid strategy
execution as well.
• Chapter 2 presents a more complete overview of the strategic management pro-
cess, covering topics ranging from the role of vision, mission, and values to what
constitutes good corporate governance. It makes a great assignment for the sec-
ond day of class and provides a smooth transition into the heart of the course. It
introduces students to such core concepts as strategic versus financial objectives,
the balanced scorecard, strategic intent, and business-level versus corporate-level
xii PREFACE

strategies. It explains why all managers are on a company’s strategy-making, strategy-­

executing team and why a company’s strategic plan is a collection of strategies
devised by different managers at different levels in the organizational hierarchy.
The chapter concludes with a section on the role of the board of directors in the
strategy-making, strategy-executing process and examines the conditions that have
led to recent high-profile corporate governance failures. The illustration capsule on
Volkswagen’s emissions scandal brings this section to life.
• The next two chapters introduce students to the two most fundamental perspec-
tives on strategy making: the positioning view, exemplified by Michael Porter’s
“five forces model of competition”; and the resource-based view. Chapter 3 pro-
vides what has long been the clearest, most straightforward discussion of the five forces
framework to be found in any text on strategic management. It also offers a set of
complementary analytical tools for conducting competitor analysis, identifying
strategic groups along with the mobility barriers that limit movement among them,
and demonstrates the importance of tailoring strategy to fit the circumstances of
a company’s industry and competitive environment. The chapter includes a discus-
sion of the value net framework, which is useful for conducting analysis of how
cooperative as well as competitive moves by various parties contribute to the cre-
ation and capture of value in an industry.
• Chapter 4 presents the resource-based view of the firm, showing why resource and
capability analysis is such a powerful tool for sizing up a company’s competitive
assets. It offers a simple framework for identifying a company’s resources and capa-
bilities and explains how the VRIN framework can be used to determine whether
they can provide the company with a sustainable competitive advantage over its
competitors. Other topics covered in this chapter include dynamic capabilities,
SWOT analysis, value chain analysis, benchmarking, and competitive strength
assessments, thus enabling a solid appraisal of a company’s cost position and cus-
tomer value proposition vis-á-vis its rivals. An important feature of this chapter is
a table showing how key financial and operating ratios are calculated and how to
interpret them. Students will find this table handy in doing the number crunch-
ing needed to evaluate whether a company’s strategy is delivering good financial
performance.
• Chapter 5 sets forth the basic approaches available for competing and winning in
the marketplace in terms of the five generic competitive strategies— broad low-cost,
broad differentiation, best-cost, focused differentiation, and focused low cost. It
demonstrates pictorially the link between generic strategies, the value-price-cost
framework, and competitive advantage. The chapter also describes when each of
the five approaches works best and what pitfalls to avoid. Additionally, it explains
the role of cost drivers and uniqueness drivers in reducing a company’s costs and
enhancing its differentiation, respectively.
• Chapter 6 focuses on other strategic actions a company can take to complement its
competitive approach and maximize the power of its overall strategy. These include
a variety of offensive or defensive competitive moves, and their timing, such as blue-
ocean strategies and first-mover advantages and disadvantages. It also includes choices
concerning the breadth of a company’s activities (or its scope of operations along an
industry’s entire value chain), ranging from horizontal mergers and acquisitions, to
vertical integration, outsourcing, and strategic alliances. This material serves to segue
into the scope issues covered in the next two chapters on international and diversifi-
cation strategies.
 PREFACE xiii

• Chapter 7 takes up the topic of how to compete in international markets. It begins

with a discussion of why differing market conditions across countries must neces-
sarily influence a company’s strategic choices about how to enter and compete in
foreign markets. It presents five major strategic options for expanding a company’s
geographic scope and competing in foreign markets: export strategies, licensing,
franchising, establishing a wholly owned subsidiary via acquisition or “greenfield”
venture, and alliance strategies. It includes coverage of topics such as Porter’s
Diamond of National Competitive Advantage, multi-market competition, and the
choice between multidomestic, global, and transnational strategies. This chapter
explains the impetus for sharing, transferring, or accessing valuable resources
and capabilities across national borders in the quest for competitive advantage,
connecting the material to that on the resource-based view from Chapter 4. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the unique characteristics of competing in
developing-country markets.
• Chapter 8 concerns strategy making in the multibusiness company, introduc-
ing the topic of corporate-level strategy with its special focus on diversification.
The first portion of this chapter describes when and why diversification makes
good strategic sense, the different means of diversifying a company’s business
lineup, and the pros and cons of related versus unrelated diversification strate-
gies. The second part of the chapter looks at how to evaluate the attractiveness
of a ­diversified company’s business lineup, how to decide whether it has a good
diversification strategy, and what strategic options are available for improving
a diversified company’s future performance. The evaluative technique integrates
material concerning both industry analysis and the resource-based view, in that
it considers the relative attractiveness of the various industries the company has
diversified into, the company’s competitive strength in each of its lines of busi-
ness, and the extent to which its different businesses exhibit both strategic fit and
resource fit.
• Although the topic of ethics and values comes up at various points in this textbook,
Chapter 9 brings more direct attention to such issues and may be used as a stand-
alone assignment in either the early, middle, or late part of a course. It concerns
the themes of ethical standards in business, approaches to ensuring consistent ethi-
cal standards for companies with international operations, corporate social respon-
sibility, and environmental sustainability. The contents of this chapter are sure to
give students some things to ponder, rouse lively discussion, and help to make stu-
dents more ethically aware and conscious of why all companies should conduct their
business in a socially responsible and sustainable manner.
• The next three chapters (Chapters 10, 11, and 12) comprise a module on strategy exe-
cution that is presented in terms of a 10-step action framework. Chapter 10 provides an
overview of this framework and then explores the first three of these tasks: (1) ­staffing
the organization with people capable of executing the ­strategy well, (2) building the
organizational capabilities needed for successful strategy execution, and (3) creating
an organizational structure supportive of the strategy execution process.
• Chapter 11 discusses five additional managerial actions that advance the cause
of good strategy execution: (1) allocating resources to enable the strategy execu-
tion process, (2) ensuring that policies and procedures facilitate rather than impede
strategy execution, (3) using process management tools and best practices to drive
continuous improvement in the performance of value chain activities, (4) install-
ing information and operating systems that help company personnel carry out their
xiv PREFACE

strategic roles, and (5) using rewards and incentives to encourage good strategy
execution and the achievement of performance targets.
• Chapter 12 completes the 10-step framework with a consideration of the importance
of creating a healthy corporate culture and exercising effective leadership in promoting
good strategy execution. The recurring theme throughout the final three ­chapters
is that executing strategy involves deciding on the specific actions, behaviors, and
conditions needed for a smooth strategy-supportive operation and then follow-
ing through to get things done and deliver results. The goal here is to ensure that
students understand that the strategy-executing phase is a ­make-things-happen and
make-them-happen-right kind of managerial exercise—one that is ­critical for achieving
operating excellence and reaching the goal of strong company performance.
In this latest edition, we have put our utmost effort into ensuring that the 12 ­chapters
are consistent with the latest and best thinking of academics and practitioners in the
field of strategic management and provide the topical coverage required for both under-
graduate and MBA-level strategy courses. The ultimate test of the text, of course, is
the positive pedagogical impact it has in the classroom. If this edition sets a more effec-
tive stage for your lectures and does a better job of helping you persuade students that
the discipline of strategy merits their rapt attention, then it will have fulfilled its purpose.

THE CASE COLLECTION

The 32-case lineup in this edition is flush with interesting companies and valuable les-
sons for students in the art and science of crafting and executing strategy. There’s a
good blend of cases from a length perspective—about two-thirds of the cases are under
15 pages yet offer plenty for students to chew on; seven are medium-length cases; and the
remainder are detail-rich cases that call for more sweeping analysis.
At least 25 of the 32 cases involve companies, products, people, or activities that
students will have heard of, know about from personal experience, or can easily identify
with. The lineup includes at least 20 cases that will deepen student understanding of
the special demands of competing in industry environments where product life cycles
are short and competitive maneuvering among rivals is quite active. Twenty-three of the
cases involve situations in which company resources and competitive capabilities play
as large a role in the strategy-making, strategy executing scheme of things as industry
and competitive conditions do. Scattered throughout the lineup are 20 cases concerning
non-U.S. companies, globally competitive industries, and/or cross-cultural situations.
These cases, in conjunction with the globalized content of the text chapters, provide
abundant material for linking the study of strategic management tightly to the ongoing
globalization of the world economy. You’ll also find 10 cases dealing with the strategic
problems of family-owned or relatively small entrepreneurial businesses and 20 cases
involving public companies and situations where students can do further research on
the Internet.
The “Guide to Case Analysis” follows the last case. It contains sections on what a
case is, why cases are a standard part of courses in strategy, preparing a case for class
discussion, doing a written case analysis, doing an oral presentation, and using financial
ratio analysis to assess a company’s financial condition. We suggest having students
read this guide before the first class discussion of a case.
A number of cases have accompanying YouTube video segments which are listed in
Section 3 of the Instructor’s Manual and in the Teaching Note for each case.
 PREFACE xv

THE TWO STRATEGY SIMULATION SUPPLEMENTS:

THE BUSINESS STRATEGY GAME AND GLO-BUS
The Business Strategy Game and GLO-BUS: Developing Winning Competitive Strategies—­
two competition-based strategy simulations that are delivered online and that feature
automated processing and grading of performance—are being marketed by the pub-
lisher as companion supplements for use with the 22nd edition (and other texts in
the field).
• The Business Strategy Game is the world’s most popular strategy simulation, hav-
ing been used by nearly 3,300 different instructors for courses involving some
900,000 students at 1,235+ university campuses in 76 countries. It features global
competition in the athletic footwear industry, a product/market setting familiar to
students everywhere and one whose managerial challenges are easily grasped. A
freshly updated and much-enhanced version of The Business Strategy Game was
introduced in August 2018.
• GLO-BUS, a newer and somewhat simpler strategy simulation first introduced in
2004 and freshly revamped in 2016 to center on competition in two exciting prod-
uct categories--wearable miniature action cameras and unmanned camera-equipped
drones suitable for multiple commercial purposes, has been used by 1,750+ ­different
instructors for courses involving nearly 300,000 students at 750+ university cam-
puses in 53 countries.

How the Strategy Simulations Work

In both The Business Strategy Game (BSG) and GLO-BUS, class members are divided
into teams of one to five persons and assigned to run a company that competes head-
to-head against companies run by other class members. In both simulations, companies
compete in a global market arena, selling their products in four geographic regions—
Europe-Africa, North America, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. Each management
team is called upon to craft a strategy for their company and make decisions relating to
production operations, workforce compensation, pricing and marketing, social respon-
sibility/citizenship, and finance.
Company co-managers are held accountable for their decision making. Each com-
pany’s performance is scored on the basis of earnings per share, return-on-equity
­investment, stock price, credit rating, and image rating. Rankings of company perfor-
mance, along with a wealth of industry and company statistics, are available to ­company
co-managers after each decision round to use in making strategy adjustments and oper-
ating decisions for the next competitive round. You can be certain that the market envi-
ronment, strategic issues, and operating challenges that company co-managers must
contend with are very tightly linked to what your class members will be reading about
in the text chapters. The circumstances that co-managers face in running their simula-
tion company embrace the very concepts, analytical tools, and strategy options they
encounter in the text chapters (this is something you can quickly confirm by skimming
through some of the Exercises for Simulation Participants that appear at the end of
each chapter).
We suggest that you schedule 1 or 2 practice rounds and anywhere from 4 to 10 ­regular
(scored) decision rounds (more rounds are better than fewer rounds). Each decision
round represents a year of company operations and will entail roughly two hours of time
xvi PREFACE

for company co-managers to complete. In traditional 13-week, semester-long courses, there

is merit in scheduling one decision round per week. In courses that run 5 to 10 weeks,
it is wise to schedule two decision rounds per week for the last several weeks of the
term (­sample course schedules are provided for courses of varying length and varying
­numbers of class meetings).
When the instructor-specified deadline for a decision round arrives, the simulation
server automatically accesses the saved decision entries of each company, determines
the competitiveness and buyer appeal of each company’s product offering relative to the
other companies being run by students in your class, and then awards sales and market
shares to the competing companies, geographic region by geographic region. The unit
sales volumes awarded to each company are totally governed by
• How its prices compare against the prices of rival brands.
• How its product quality compares against the quality of rival brands.
• How its product line breadth and selection compare.
• How its advertising effort compares.
• And so on, for a total of 11 competitive factors that determine unit sales and mar-
ket shares.
The competitiveness and overall buyer appeal of each company’s product offering
in comparison to the product offerings of rival companies is all-decisive—this algorithmic
feature is what makes BSG and GLO-BUS “competition-based” strategy simulations.
Once each company’s sales and market shares are awarded based on the competitive-
ness and buyer appeal of its respective overall product offering vis-à-vis those of rival
­companies, the various company and industry reports detailing the outcomes of the
decision round are then generated. Company co-managers can access the results of
the decision round 15 to 20 minutes after the decision deadline.

The Compelling Case for Incorporating

Use of a Strategy Simulation
There are three exceptionally important benefits associated with using a competition-
based simulation in strategy courses taken by seniors and MBA students:
• A three-pronged text-case-simulation course model delivers significantly more teaching-
learning power than the traditional text-case model. Using both cases and a strategy
simulation to drill students in thinking strategically and applying what they read
in the text chapters is a stronger, more effective means of helping them connect
theory with practice and develop better business judgment. What cases do that a
simulation cannot is give class members broad exposure to a variety of companies
and industry situations and insight into the kinds of strategy-related problems man-
agers face. But what a competition-based strategy simulation does far better than
case analysis is thrust class members squarely into an active, hands-on managerial
role where they are totally responsible for assessing market conditions, determining
how to respond to the actions of competitors, forging a long-term direction and
strategy for their company, and making all kinds of operating decisions. Because
they are held fully accountable for their decisions and their company’s perfor-
mance, co-managers are strongly motivated to dig deeply into company operations,
probe for ways to be more cost-efficient and competitive, and ferret out strategic
moves and decisions calculated to boost company performance. Consequently,
 PREFACE xvii

incorporating both case assignments and a strategy simulation to develop the skills
of class members in thinking strategically and applying the concepts and tools of stra-
tegic analysis turns out to be more pedagogically powerful than relying solely on case
assignments—there’s stronger retention of the lessons learned and better achievement of
course learning objectives.
To provide you with quantitative evidence of the learning that occurs with using
The Business Strategy Game or GLO-BUS, there is a built-in Learning Assurance
Report showing how well each class member performs on nine skills/learning
measures versus tens of thousands of students worldwide who have completed the
simulation in the past 12 months.
• The competitive nature of a strategy simulation arouses positive energy and steps
up the whole tempo of the course by a notch or two. Nothing sparks class excite-
ment quicker or better than the concerted efforts on the part of class members
at each decision round to achieve a high industry ranking and avoid the perilous
consequences of being outcompeted by other class members. Students really enjoy
taking on the role of a manager, running their own company, crafting strategies,
­making all kinds of operating decisions, trying to outcompete rival companies, and
getting immediate feedback on the resulting company performance. Lots of back-
and-forth ­chatter occurs when the results of the latest simulation round become
available and ­co-managers renew their quest for strategic moves and actions that
will strengthen company performance. Co-managers become emotionally invested
in running their company and figuring out what strategic moves to make to boost
their company’s performance. Interest levels climb. All this stimulates learning and
causes ­students to see the practical relevance of the subject matter and the benefits
of taking your course.
As soon as your students start to say “Wow! Not only is this fun but I am learn-
ing a lot,” which they will, you have won the battle of engaging students in the sub-
ject matter and moved the value of taking your course to a much higher plateau in
the business school curriculum. This translates into a livelier, richer learning experi-
ence from a student perspective and better instructor-course evaluations.
• Use of a fully automated online simulation reduces the time instructors spend on
course preparation, course administration, and grading. Since the simulation exercise
involves a 20- to 30-hour workload for student teams (roughly 2 hours per deci-
sion round times 10 to 12 rounds, plus optional assignments), simulation adopters
often compensate by trimming the number of assigned cases from, say, 10 to 12 to
perhaps 4 to 6. This significantly reduces the time instructors spend reading cases,
studying teaching notes, and otherwise getting ready to lead class discussion of
a case or grade oral team presentations. Course preparation time is further cut
because you can use several class days to have students bring their laptops to class
or meet in a computer lab to work on upcoming decision rounds or a three-year
strategic plan (in lieu of lecturing on a chapter or covering an additional assigned
case). Not only does use of a simulation permit assigning fewer cases, but it also
permits you to eliminate at least one assignment that entails considerable grad-
ing on your part. Grading one less written case or essay exam or other written
assignment saves enormous time. With BSG and GLO-BUS, grading is effortless
and takes only minutes; once you enter percentage weights for each assignment in
your online grade book, a suggested overall grade is calculated for you. You’ll be
pleasantly surprised—and quite pleased—at how little time it takes to gear up for and
administer The Business Strategy Game or GLO-BUS.
xviii PREFACE

In sum, incorporating use of a strategy simulation turns out to be a win–win propo-

sition for both students and instructors. Moreover, a very convincing argument can be
made that a competition-based strategy simulation is the single most effective teaching/
learning tool that instructors can employ to teach the discipline of business and competitive
strategy, to make learning more enjoyable, and to promote better achievement of course
learning objectives.

A Bird’s-Eye View of The Business Strategy Game

The setting for The Business Strategy Game (BSG) is the global athletic footwear indus-
try (there can be little doubt in today’s world that a globally competitive strategy simu-
lation is vastly superior to a simulation with a domestic-only setting). Global market
demand for footwear grows at the rate of 7 to 9 percent annually for the first five years
and 5 to 7 percent annually for the second five years. However, market growth rates vary
by geographic region—North America, Latin America, Europe-Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
Companies begin the simulation producing branded and private-label footwear in
two plants, one in North America and one in Asia. They have the option to establish
production facilities in Latin America and Europe-Africa. Company co-managers exer-
cise control over production costs on the basis of the styling and quality they opt to
manufacture, plant location (wages and incentive compensation vary from region
to region), the use of best practices and Six Sigma programs to reduce the production
of defective footwear and to boost worker productivity, and compensation practices.
All newly produced footwear is shipped in bulk containers to one of four geographic
distribution centers. All sales in a geographic region are made from footwear invento-
ries in that region’s distribution center. Costs at the four regional distribution ­centers
are a function of inventory storage costs, packing and shipping fees, import tariffs
paid on incoming pairs shipped from foreign plants, and exchange rate impacts. At
the start of the simulation, import tariffs average $4 per pair in North America, $6 in
­Europe-Africa, $8 per pair in Latin America, and $10 in the Asia-Pacific region. Instruc-
tors have the option to alter tariffs as the game progresses.
Companies market their brand of athletic footwear to footwear retailers world-
wide and to individuals buying online at the company’s website. Each company’s sales
and market share in the branded footwear segments hinge on its competitiveness on
13 ­factors: attractive pricing, footwear styling and quality, product line breadth, adver-
tising, use of mail-in rebates, appeal of celebrities endorsing a company’s brand, suc-
cess in convincing footwear retailers to carry its brand, number of weeks it takes to fill
retailer orders, effectiveness of a company’s online sales effort at its website, and brand
reputation. Sales of private-label footwear hinge solely on being the low-price bidder.
All told, company co-managers make as many as 57 types of decisions each period
that cut across production operations (up to 11 decisions per plant, with a maximum
of four plants), the addition of facility space, equipment, and production improve-
ment options (up to 8 decisions per plant), worker compensation and training (up to
6 ­decisions per plant), shipping and distribution center operations (5 decisions per
­geographic region), pricing and marketing (up to 9 decisions in four geographic
regions), bids to sign ­celebrities (2 decision entries per bid), financing of company
operations (up to 8 decisions), and corporate social responsibility and environmental
sustainability (up to 8 decisions). Plus, there are 10 entries for each region pertaining
to assumptions about the upcoming-year actions and competitive efforts of rival com-
panies that factor directly into the forecasts of a company’s unit sales, revenues, and
market share in each of the four geographic regions.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
was without true depth, either ideal or phenomenal. As to the first,
we have only to think of the bursting passion with which the Gothic
world-feeling discharged itself upon the whole Western landscape,
and we shall see at once what sort of a movement it was that the
handful of select spirits—scholars, artists and humanists—initiated
about 1420.[300] In the first the issue was one of life and death for a
new-born soul, in the second it was a point of—taste. The Gothic
gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It
created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to
the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly
tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from
language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-
painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the
stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when
it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It
altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not
one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the
roots of life it could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the
Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.[301] It produced no
wholly great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of
whom had one foot outside its limits. And as for the other—
phenomenal or manifested depth—the Renaissance never touched
the people, even in Florence itself. The man for whom they had ears
was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite another spiritual order and
one which begins to be comprehensible when we discern the fact
that, all the time, the deep under-currents are steadily flowing on
towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance as an anti-
Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of polyphonic
music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement. This
was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian
world-feeling. It did not “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult, but
merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the
Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique
was called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already
there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece
and (therefore) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in
reality an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture,
which physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and
especially of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul
attempts to make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends.
The inwardly recalcitrant forces—Faust’s second Soul that would
separate itself from the other—are striving to deflect the sense of the
Culture, to repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable
necessity; it stands anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its
historical fate in Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in
Greece to the Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-
squandering orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the
Antique and its cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the
alien expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately,
in order that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should
provide the suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their
own, and so enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the
stream which flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in
the West that which flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through
Rembrandt, to Beethoven.
It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is
far easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at.
This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and
the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending for something,
not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than
anti-Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself;
the music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars
nova,” that of the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German
counterpoint, both alike essentially Gothic and the property of the
whole West.
The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very
clear instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a
movement may be mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since
Burckhardt,[302] criticism has controverted every individual proposition
that the leading spirits of the age put forward as to their own
tendencies—and yet, this done, it has continued to use the word
Renaissance substantially in the former sense. Certainly, one is
conscious at once in passing to the south of the Alps of a marked
dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in the look of the arts in
general. But the very obviousness of the conclusion that the
impression prompts should have led us to distrust it and to ask
ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of Gothic and
“antique” was not in reality merely a difference between Northern
and Southern aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty of
things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely
because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the
great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi
in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would
certainly guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to
have set in not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for
Tuscany is artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs
entirely to a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine
monument of the counter-Renaissance, and Rome is already the
home of Baroque. But, in fact, it is the change of landscape that
coincides with the change of feeling.
In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward
share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the
domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the
South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic,
and it implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in
vain in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat
Mater,” the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone
Martini! At the same time, it was lighted from the South and its
strangeness was, as it were, softened in acclimatization. That which
it suppressed or expelled was not, as has been supposed, some
lingering strains of the Classical but purely the Byzantine-cum-
Saracen form-language that appealed to the senses in familiar
everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and Venice but even
more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms imported from
the East.
If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may
mean) of the Classical world-feeling, then, surely, would it not have
had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered
space by that of closed structural body? But there was never any
question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly
and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic,
from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und
Drang” it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free
and unquestioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the
extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to
façades and courtyards.
Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a
house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant
of the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to
its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from the
Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as
genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple
of Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no
one attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture,
for Attic is free plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words,
whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche
into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the
relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the
masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the
“George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of
“Antique” and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither
intensified nor contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and
Ghiberti and even Verrocchio.
If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements
that originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say,
those belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from
Late-Roman architecture itself all elements derived from the great
days of Hellas had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all,
though, is that motive which actually dominates the Renaissance,
which because of its Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the
Renaissance characters, viz., the association of round-arch and
column. This association, no doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the
Classical style it simply does not exist, and in fact it represents the
leitmotif of the Magian architecture that originated in Syria.
But it was just then that the South received from the North those
decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself
entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque.
In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris[303]—
the counter-pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—
counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with
the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516
came to the Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that
Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The
successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine
commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the Portinari altar for
Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And
over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low-Countries
portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In
1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his
art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent
introduced oil-painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought
what he had learned in the Netherlands to Venice. How much
“Dutch” and how little “Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino
Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of
Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to
admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North
upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the
Renaissance.[304] It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus,
Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into
mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that contrapuntal method of
number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as
Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the
decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and
thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque,
Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic
of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is
still effective even in Galileo.
The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of apparent
expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades,
in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched,
Florence did uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially
metaphysical and essentially defensive—an image of the Classical
so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without
exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for
our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of
Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for
us the Classical is, an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only
deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it
is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is
the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.
But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In
Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic
glass-painting and Byzantine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one
moment in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the
paramount art. The dominant elements in the picture are the poised
bodies, the ordered groups, the structural side of architecture. The
backgrounds possess no intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up
between and behind the self-sufficient present of the foreground-
figures. For a while here, painting is actually under the domination of
plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all
the same, these frescoes have nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in
them. Examine a collection of Classical painted vases—not in
individual specimens or copies (which would give the wrong idea)
but in the mass, for this is the one species of Classical art in which
originals are plentiful enough to impress us effectively with the will
that is behind the art. In the light of such a study, the utter un-
Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to the eye. The great
achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a fresco-art is only
apparently a revival of the Apollinian way of feeling; but the depth-
experience and idea of extension that underlies it is not the
Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the Gothic field
(Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they exist. Yet
here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of atmosphere,
the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed in
Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero
della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were
painted, they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like
music ever striving into the depths, but as sensuously definable.
Space was given a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and
drawing, sharpness of outline, definition of surface were studied with
a care that seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was
always this difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as
singular in contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented
things as separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And
in proportion as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the
hardness of this tendency receded, from Masaccio’s frescoes in the
Brancacci Chapel to Raphael’s in the Vatican Stanze, until the
sfumato of Leonardo, the melting of the edges into the background,
brings a musical ideal in place of the relief-ideal into painting. The
hidden dynamic is equally unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence
—it would be perfectly hopeless to look for an Attic companion for
Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.[305] This art was a mask, a mode of
the taste of an élite, and sometimes a comedy—though never was
comedy more gallantly played out. The indescribable inward purity of
Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native
strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again,
is the only foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never
even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or “revived”
it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly under literary
influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize the negative
element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little such
currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of
their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those
of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace
courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on
slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to
imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous
domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of
Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of
early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as
the “Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was
naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament
—is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly
there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation
of Gothic. But what is the provenance of that gay and elegant
embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has
captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home
of a “taste” and the home of the expression-means that it employs:
one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives
of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia. We have to
distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches
between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself
is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the
form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical
element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-
Classical is being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in
the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are
far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no
such thing is to be found.
And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving
something wonderful that music could not reproduce—a feeling for
the bliss of perfect nearness, for pure, restful and liberating space-
effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of
Gothic and Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical
existence, the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to
forget itself.

VI

And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins
for Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and
that of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic,
“picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of
the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The
technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer
space and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and
Giorgione begins Impressionism.
In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The
background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as
space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant
importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other
Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so
near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the
sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction
between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-
experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a
picture. The space-relief of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in
Tintoretto into directional energy, and there emerges in the picture
the great symbol of an unlimited space-universe which comprises
the individual things within itself as incidentals—the horizon. Now,
that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed
so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the
important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not
and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief
or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase-paintings and frescoes of the
Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial
treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which
heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far,
contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal” principle. It is out
of the remoteness of this horizon that the music of the picture flows,
and for this reason the great landscape-painters of Holland paint
only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the contrary reason
“anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially Mantegna, paint
only foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon, then, that Music
triumphs over Plastic, the passion of extension over its substance. It
is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt has a
foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep
understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances
is found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-
background of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme.
The first definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books
of Hours of the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin)
about 1416. Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.
The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art
concerns itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter
of the Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality.
But very early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through
them, with the long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione
and Paolo Veronese above all) discovered the full magic of the
cloud-world, of the thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with
its sheets and wisps and mountains. Grünewald and the
Netherlanders heightened its significance to the level of tragedy. El
Greco brought the grand art of cloud-symbolism to Spain.
 It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and
counterpoint the art of gardens ripened. Here, expressed on the
canvas of Nature itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues,
vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in
painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early
Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and
Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may
take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of
perspective, this mathematical consecration of the picture (whether
landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely
increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It
was the proclamation of the Prime-Symbol. The point at which the
perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided
infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting possessed no
perspective. Consequently the Park, the deliberate manipulation of
Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility
in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a
garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with
ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans
of those “gardens” that have been preserved[306] is enough to show
the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And
yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying
down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the
spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks
of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[307] we can see the importance of
the perspective view into distance becoming ever greater and
greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow
lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.
The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the
point de vue of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues
and clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out
to lose itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the
Chinese garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-
bright distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in
Couperin for example). It is the point de vue that gives us the key to
a real understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself
speak the form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle
akin to the dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in
our mathematic: as the remainder-expression[308] reveals the ultimate
meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in
the garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was
we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that
prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless
range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be
alone with endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and
the landscape-gardeners of Northern France, beginning with
Fouquet’s epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they
were able to render this symbol with such high emphasis. Compare
the Renaissance park of the Medicean age—capable of being taken
in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with these parks in which all the water-
works, statue-rows, hedges and labyrinths are instinct with the
suggestion of long range. It is the Destiny of Western oil-painting told
over again in a bit of garden-history.
But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history.
At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the
future. The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the
approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for
the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-
language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to
awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The
very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western
languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in
the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and
Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in
Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the
withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a
megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant
mountain chain—all tell us that the depth-experience which
constitutes our space-world for us is in the last analysis our inward
certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of time, of the
irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become
directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the “third
dimension” of that experienced space which is living self-extension.
And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our
megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the
17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our
streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of
preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of
these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the
Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of
crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in
the midst of bodies.[309] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so
called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.
With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full
metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated
upon the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the
beholder had accepted the contents of the picture for what they
were, as self-sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth
the contents became a means, the mere vehicle of a meaning that
was beyond the possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or
Signorelli the pencil sketch could have stood as the picture, without
being carried out in colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only
regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like
sketch, colour is a mere supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could
be told by Michelangelo that he did not know how to draw. The
“object,” i.e., that which could be exactly fixed by the drawn outline,
the near and material, had in fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the
theory of art was still dominated by Renaissance impressions, there
arose thereupon that strange and interminable conflict concerning
the “form” and the “content” of an art-work. Mis-enunciation of the
question has concealed its real and deep significance from us. The
first point for consideration should have been whether painting was
to be conceived of plastically or musically, as a static of things or as
a dynamic of space (for in this lies the essence of the opposition
between fresco and oil technique), and the second point, the
opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling. Outlines define
the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[310] But the picture of
the first order belongs to directly sensible nature—it narrates. Space,
on the contrary, is by its very essence transcendent and addresses
itself to our imaginative powers, and in an art that is under its
suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures the more
profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the
secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial
opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a Western
one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the
significance of pictorial elements that took place when the
Renaissance closed down and instrumental music of the grand style
came to the front. For the Classical mind no problem of form and
content in this sense could exist; in an Attic statue the two are
completely identical and identified in the human body.
The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact
that it involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer
sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the
genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the
feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its indescribable
charm for the Faustian intellects that have to fight for self-
expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the
contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure refreshment:
here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely.
And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic
tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness,
distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian
painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too,
music. And the Gothic per se had been esoteric from its very
beginnings—witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem
and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to
the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored
by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something
for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in
these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since
the age of enlightenment invented the phrase “art for all.” But
Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, “for all.” If
modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever
decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away
from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand.
It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space—
the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are. And
with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting,
and this element does not give itself away to the layman. For
Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning.
His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual
eye. An art without space is a priori unphilosophical.

VII

With this is connected an important principle of composition. In a

picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another
or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of
perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the
dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does
not necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men
and children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought
the sense-impressions of their world more or less into fundamental
order. But this order differs in the different Cultures according to the
prime symbols of these Cultures. The sort of perspective
composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is
neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture.
Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed
ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the
picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with
a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of
representation. Polygnotus’s frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians
at Delphi are a celebrated instance of this. There is no background
to connect the individual scenes—for such a background would have
been a challenge to the principle that things alone are actual and
space non-existent. The pediment of the Ægina temple, the
procession of gods on the François Vase and the Frieze of the
Giants of Pergamum are all composed as meander-syntheses of
separate and interchangeable motives, without organic character. It
is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus Frieze of the altar of
Pergamum is the earliest example that has been preserved) that the
un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes into existence. In
this respect, as in others, the feeling of the Renaissance was truly
Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to such a pitch of
perfection that its work remains the pattern for all following ages. But
the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the last analysis, it was
a silent music of colour-illumined extension that created within itself
light-resistances, which the understanding eye could grasp as things
and as existence, and could set marching with an invisible swing and
rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial ordering, with its
unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective for line-
perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.
And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and
Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and
Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close
upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance.
Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims
that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque.
Both arts—Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits
prime phenomena. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore
a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could
thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the
shadow of painting, garden-art, or architecture. The art of the West
had no real need of them. There was no longer a style of plastic in
the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent
tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon,
Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel
outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of
its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for
whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even
Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic,
and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that
Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful
performances no doubt, but not one single work of the same order
as the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that
expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind.
This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant
nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be
rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like
Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or
Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the
decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an
artist is always visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance
like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an
architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator like Coysevox. And
his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that
this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a
mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific
style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical world,
correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with
probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give
way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian
arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it
had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development
as a higher art.

VIII

The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow,

red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and,
since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely
material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account
for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even
Nietzsche discussed this (Morgenröte, 426).
But why did this painting in its great days avoid blue and even
blue-green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at
greenish-yellow and bluish-red? It is not that the ancient artists did
not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had
blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with
the triglyphs; and trade-painting used all the colours that were
technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic
Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-painting; and a bright blue
colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the
higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by
its prime symbol.
Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful
plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote
mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial
colours. They are cold, they disembody, and they evoke impressions
of expanse and distance and boundlessness.
For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus.
And for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space-
creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-
painting, from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic
and supremely important tone which supports the ensemble of the
intended colour-effect, as the basso continuo supports the orchestra,
whereas the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in
dependence upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and
familiar green that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at
that—use for draperies, but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand
nuances into white and grey and brown; something deeply musical,
into which (notably in Gobelin tapestry) the whole atmosphere is
plunged. That quality which we have named aerial perspective in
contrast to linear—and might also have called Baroque perspective
in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost exclusively upon this. We
find it with more and more intense depth-effect in Leonardo,
Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in Ruysdael and Hobbema
in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great French painters, from
Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot. Blue, equally a
perspective colour, always stands in relation to the dark, the
unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it pulls us out
into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls it in his
Farbenlehre.
Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours.
They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in
oil-painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of
the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic
colour of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the
beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the
statue and the Doric column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the
Madonna’s mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself
in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red
succumbing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of
priests living in celibacy.
 Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd,
of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and
the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue,
with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these
colours. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic
colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they
are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve
immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical
Fatum, the point-existence. But blue and green—the Faustian,
monotheistic colours—are those of loneliness, of care, of a present
that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation
governing the universe from within.
The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean
to the individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter.
All the genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-
symbol requires the overcoming of the apparent, the life of struggle
and not that of acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination
to space as to blues and blacks. There are profound observations on
the connexion between ideas of space and the meaning of colour in
Goethe’s studies of “entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the
symbolism that is enunciated by him in the Farbenlehre and that
which we have deduced here from the ideas of Space and Destiny
are in complete agreement.
The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is
Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his nights is
equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here,
is it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the
interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically
Catholic colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic”
strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that
was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the
Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote
from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine
pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the
painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect
of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon
work being exhibited indoors. Classical painting is emphatically a
public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of
our great oil-painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century,
is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the
same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-
standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely
superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to
disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for
Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and
green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far,
would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground
and its unit-bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of
Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of
Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost
inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-
perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to
render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that
is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.

IX

Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by

means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of
the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic
purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the
work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who
were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine
models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of
which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices.
In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working
upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian
Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately
present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as
pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers
towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial
idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all
happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the
world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the
depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that
stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As
compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-
impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated
by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance
incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied
with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is
practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It recalls
impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala,
the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the
inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The
gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their
substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus
or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of
space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost
unintelligible to our world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism of
this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a
principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and
Neo-Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.
Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the
body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm
pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling
character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical
notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the
Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They
played a decisive part in the disputes of the Councils upon the
substantiality of Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses,
in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic
significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of
the divine spirit. It represents the Arabian form of the Christian world-
consciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a
thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the
only one metaphysically—and even ethically—possible and seemly
in representations of the Christian legend. When “natural”
backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth
perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at first the
appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma