• The recipe: Selecting an approach – and a textbook – involves a baffling array of choices. We can choose from a huge assortment of cookbooks, too numerous to mention, offering recipes like 200g of PEST, 350g of SWOT, Five Forces, three (or four) Generic Strategies, and a sprinkling of Value Chain. What students will generate and remember is often just the shopping list, because they leave our kitchens before the warm and enticing smells start to waft from the strategy oven.
• Philosophising: As an alternative, we can teach strategy as philosophy, picking from the charming Strategy Safari (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 2009), the demanding Images of Strategy (Cummings & Wilson, 2003) or the transcendental What is Strategy? (Whittington, 2001). Such books help lecturers escape more programmatic modes of thought, but with a risk. Students, especially those with limited first-hand experience of business, have not yet experienced enough of the physics beneath to scale the metaphysics above.

There are other methods, too, not least the tried and tested case-study approach, which works when students have time but only to the extent of the handful of tools they then deploy – and those are often the oldest and ones that beg the greatest number of questions. What is a lecturer to do?