This article helps you to understand and appreciate some key concepts in strategy, and this is the sense that we call it "Basic Strategy". Strategy is the discipline that seeks to explain why organisations do what they do, and how they can be changed to achieve a purpose (such as make profits or survive). Although strategy concepts are typically concerned with firms, they can also be applied to individuals undertaking small scale businesses, and groups of firms that are linked to each other. Strategy is also a field where there are well defined principles of thinking, and some critical concepts.

However as we are dealing with basic strategy we make no claim that there is a great difference to other published offerings in our coverage of strategic concepts. A major difference between this work and others is found in our placing real world cases at the core of each chapter, and then tightly linking the strategy concepts and the case together. For this reason we address in some detail below the importance of cases to this book and also to you as the reader.