On the origin of strategy

We use an in-depth case history to develop a perspective on how managers search for a strategy. The perspective employs the variable time to frame the question of strategy's origins in a distinctive way. Over time, the cognitive and physical elements that make up a strategy become less plastic, while mechanisms to search rationally for a strategy become more available. This highlights a fundamental tension in the origin of strategy: managers struggle to understand their environment well enough to search rationally for an effective strategy before their firms lose the plasticity necessary to exploit that understanding. A focus on time also allows us to synthesize and extend the evolutionary and positioning models of strategic search. We identify times when strategic search displays the limited plasticity and rationality of the evolutionary model, times when other combinations of plasticity and rationality prevail.