There are certain concepts that dominate how we presently understand strategy and strategic management. These schools of thought range from primitive design and planning disciplines to more modern environmental, cultural, and learning concepts.

Some of these schools of thought are categorized as prescriptive, descriptive, and both descriptive and prescriptive. Prescriptive schools of strategic management include the design, planning, and positioning approaches. The design school tries to determine a good fit for businesses through conducting case studies on strategy making. These days, the design school is thought of as neither analytical or intuitive and too static for this age of rapid change.

The planning school of strategic management supports concepts on formalizing strategy through the creation of programs. However, it does not support real time strategy formulation, nor does it egg on creative accidents. The positioning school on the other hand is based on concepts from Sun Tzu’s „The Art of War“. It analyzes different factors that affect strategy formulation and from these evaluations, calculates strategies that can be adopted by business managers. The downside of strictly sticking to the positioning school is that it reduces strategy to generic positions chosen through various analyses of industry situations.

Descriptive schools of strategic management include several approaches such as entrepreneurial, cognitive, and leaning. The entrepreneurial school focuses on centralized strategies, mainly based on the business leader’s intuition. In the cognitive school, strategies tend to be too subjective and often remain as mere strategies in the minds of those who formulate them. Strategies in the cognitive school are often created out of worry, wherein they are used to cope with the different factors that affect the business. The learning school pushes for adaptive strategy, wherein businesses play with strategies rather than pursue them. In the process, business leaders learn and in turn, strategy development tends to become a rather chaotic process than a result-oriented one.

The configuration school is an example of the combined descriptive and prescriptive strategic management. In this school strategy tends to be polarized, often favoring either incremental or radical change. Strategies also tend to be integrated rather than adaptive.

Academics and consultants often focus on specific schools of thought, while business managers start to appreciate that they will better reap the fruits of strategic management when they try to have a view of the bigger picture. Strategic management starts to fail when academics, consultants, and business managers limit themselves to a single school of thought and take its concepts too seriously. So it is important that strategic managers are able to see the need for a wider yet systemic perspective, and better practices combined with narrow techniques or theories.