Strategy Diamond
A five-part framework — arenas, vehicles, differentiators, staging, and economic logic — for defining a complete business strategy, developed by Donald Hambrick and James Fredrickson.
The Strategy Diamond is a framework introduced by Donald Hambrick and James Fredrickson in their 2001 paper "Are You Sure You Have a Strategy?" It argues that most companies describe fragments of a strategy — a mission statement, a set of goals, a marketing plan — without ever articulating a complete, integrated strategy.
A complete strategy, in this framework, answers five questions at once: where will we be active (arenas), how will we get there (vehicles), how will we win (differentiators), what will be our sequence and pace (staging), and how will we obtain our returns (economic logic).
The value of the framework is coherence: each of the five facets must reinforce the others. A company that picks premium arenas but pursues a low-cost economic logic, for example, has an internal contradiction rather than a strategy. Tools like the Strategy Coherence Index apply this framework directly, scoring how well the five facets fit together rather than scoring them in isolation.
See how your own strategy scores
Run your business through the Strategy Coherence Index for a free executive summary across all five dimensions of the Strategy Diamond.
Start your assessment