[Practicing executives] unevenly qualified by education and experience but uniformly burdened by the same kind of responsibility, is made elite not b… - Kenneth R. Andrews

The determination of strategy also requires consideration of what alternative is preferred by the chief executive and perhaps by his immediate associates as well, quite apart from economic considerations. Personal values, aspirations, and ideals do, and in our judgment quite properly should, influence the final choice of purposes. Thus, what the executives of a company want to do must be brought into the strategic decision.

We now move to what they ought to do — from the viewpoint of various leaders and segments of society and their own standards of right and wrong. Ethics, like preference, may be considered a product of values.

[It was Andrew's intention to supply a] conceptual framework for thinking about the problems that confront the general manager, breaking his problems down into more manageable units, and proposing a sequence in which they might be reasonably ranked and considered.