Strategic Thinking in 3D

Effective strategic thinking requires a clear understanding of one’s external environment. Each organization has a unique environment, but as Ross Harrison explains in Strategic Thinking in 3D, any environment—whether in the fields of national security, foreign policy, or business—has three dimensions: systems, opponents, and groups. Systems strategy involves the challenge of creating leverage against opponents by shaping the external environments they rely on for sustaining their power. Opponents-based strategy requires analyzing a competitor’s capability, motivation, and strategy, assessing one’s own competitive challenges, and then developing approaches for directly confronting the opponent. Group strategy aims to mobilize political, consumer, and market groups against the power of an opponent. Strategic Thinking in 3D makes strategy “portable” for individuals who switch careers multiple times during their professional lives, moving among public, nonprofit, and private sector jobs. Harrison uses al Qaeda’s strategy against the United States as a “capstone” case study to demonstrate how strategic success often results from the cascading effect of “wins” in all three of these dimensions. Conversely, strategic failure can come from the mutual reinforcement of “losses” across these same three dimensions. Reinforcing and integrating the concepts, Harrison shows how strategy in 3D actually works in practice.

ROSS HARRISON is a professor in the practice of international affairs at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and also teaches Middle East politics at the University of Pittsburgh. He has served as a corporate CEO, has been on corporate advisory boards, and has worked with an international NGO on its strategic challenges. A member of a group of colleagues (from the U.S. Army War College) that works on improving the teaching of strategy, Harrison lives in Washington, D.C.