How can today's business cope with increasing uncertainty? The answer lies in opening up avenues of strategic flexibility. The authors tell how.

A procedure for identifying strategic groups based on mobility barriers is recommended and illustrated. The strategic groups identified were observed to exhibit group membership stability and differences in profitability.

This article develops an analytical and empirical framework for examining strategy over the business cycle. Firms were observed to adjust their strategies sign@cantly and asymmetrically over business cycle stages. There was no consistency in performance between up markets and down markets. A variable-parameter profitability model of strategy in a cyclical industry suggested the importance of a strategy's contemporaneous and inter-temporal relationships with performance. Discrepancies were observed between actual strategies and optimal strategies over business cycle stages.

The inter‐market and intra‐market orders of entry and their performance consequences are examined for an industrial product. First entrants consist typically of both multinational and local firms, while early followers are multinational firms, and later entrants are smaller, local firms. A strong order of entry‐market share relationship is observed in international markets. First entrants and later entrants outsurvive early followers. The analysis reveals a strategy for achieving both first‐entry into many markets and dominance within those markets. Simultaneous entry into multiple markets occurs infrequently and in mature stages of the product life‐cycle.

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