A Review of Ghemawat's Commitment: The Dynamic of Strategy

Commitment: The Dynamic of Strategy , by Pankaj Ghemawat. Ghemawat's Commitment makes recent results in game‐theoretic industrial organization accessible and useful to practitioners in the field of strategic management. This book contributes to the management strategy literature on two levels. On a conceptual level, Ghemawat strives to isolate “commitment” as the sole explanation of persistent differences in firm performance. On a more pragmatic level, he provides a framework intended to aid managers in making commitment‐intensive decisions. It is with respect to how well he achieves these two distinct goals that I evaluate Ghemawat's contribution. In addition, I review briefly the book's content, and I compare Ghemawat's approach to some alternative approaches familiar to scholars and practitioners of strategic management.