Practical Strategy

Overlooking China’s past objections, India, Japan and the United States are conducting joint naval war games this month in the Pacific Ocean, adjacent to the East China Sea. India’s decision to proceed with the trilateral exercise after five years of keeping Japan out, so as not to provoke China, indicates a new brand of maritime assertiveness. At the same time, both Indian and Chinese navies are actively building ‘blue water’ capabilities – an ability to carry out operations much farther than their territorial boundaries, across the deep oceans. As India juggles the dual imperative to simultaneously befriend and hedge against an economically and militarily rising China, the outcome of its blue water quest will influence the balance of power in Asia for years to come. Why Develop ‘Blue Water’ Capabilities? Almost unnoticed by the rest of the world, India has built one of the largest and most powerful navies in the world. However, there exist a number of drivers for further e

The connectivity initiatives that China and other Asian countries are pursuing across Asia and the Indian Ocean region—building new infrastructure, institutions, and interlinkages—is arguably redrawing the continent’s map. That has not just economic implications, but geopolitical ones. India has been relatively silent on perhaps the most talked-about of the initiatives, China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR). But, at the inaugural Raisina Dialogue, hosted in New Delhi in early March by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and the think tank Observer Research Foundation, the Indian government signaled Delhi’s concern about Beijing’s approach toward connectivity and the region more broadly. In three speeches over three days, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Minister of State for External Affairs (or deputy foreign minister) V.K. Singh, and Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar provided the clearest exposition yet of India’s official perspective on and approach toward conn

When Sen. Marco ­Rubio stands before Miami’s historic Freedom Tower on Monday and announces that he is the second Cuban American to join the 2016 race for president of the United States, Gabriel Perez, Emilio Izquierdo and Mike Valdes will share a powerful sense of pride. This is the big sign that Cuban Americans have finally made it, they all say — accepted not only as refugees from communism or as successful businesspeople but as serious contenders for the most American job in the land. But let the wave of pride surrounding the candidacies of Florida’s Rubio and fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas subside, and Perez, Izquierdo, Valdes and many of their fellow Cuban Americans find themselves in surprising discord. The idea of the Cuban American monolith, the notion that the estimated 2 million immigrants and their offspring constitute a single-issue ramrod that for a half-century has forced Washington into a hard line against the Castro brothers’ regime, is crumbling

They landed in Israel late at night — a man in a dark suit and traditional headdress, wheeling a suitcase; a mother, veiled, in a long black robe and holding a sleeping toddler; and a rabbi carrying a Torah scroll believed to be more than 500 years old. They were among a final group of 19 Yemeni Jews who were spirited out of their war-torn country in recent days, the Jewish Agency announced on Monday, bringing a monthslong clandestine rescue operation to a close. Photographs taken at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv by a representative of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that deals with Jewish immigration, documented the arrival late Sunday of the last of the Yemeni Jews who wanted to go to Israel. They are remnants of an ancient and once-vibrant group that became increasingly imperiled by violence and anti-Semitism as Yemen descended into civil war. “From Operation Magic Carpet in 1949 until the present day, the Jewish Agency has hel

                          Theories and different schools of strategy                                                                  Strategy Strategy formation creates strategy, designing new businesses and organizations to carry out those businesses. Formation involves exploration, the search for new advantages and business possibilities. Strategy formation creates a theory of business and its accompanying hypotheses. Strategy formation, or creation, is an aspect of strategic management. The BAi strategic management construct labels this aspect create art. Evolving view of strategy One of the most influential people in the arena of strategy is Michael Porter. His very popular Five Forces Model in 1980 focused strategy formulation on 'coping with competition' (Porter, 1991, 11). This has been an unduly limiting view of strategy formulation, which to a great extent has limited the effectiveness of the field of strategic management. A more illuminating definition o