How Can Company Strategy Be Evaluated? A Proposed Six-test Model

Company strategy is a set of decisions identifying the objectives to reach and the way to reach them in a competitive context. As all companies operate in competitive contexts, they all have a de facto strategy, even if it is not always the result of planning and, even when it is, it may take on a configuration other than that defined during the planning stage. For those reasons it is useful to evaluate the strategy of a firm using what can be called a “diagnostic test”, especially when competitive pressure exceeds certain limits making the context more volatile and subject to risk and uncertainty. The aim of this article is to propose a model for diagnosing the quality of a company’s strategic design and describe its application in the case of a producer of sparkling wine (spumante) conventionally called “Tenuta Alba”.