Partridge began with differentiating corporate planning and corporate strategy.

Most of the corporates had a plan in place but seldom a strategy. According to him, strategy was what enabled a corporation to be ahead of its competitor.

And most corporates, the world-over, suffered from this syndrome, he felt. In fact, the time a company's board of directors spends on strategy is a meagre 10 per cent while the rest is devoted to functional politics.

However, better organisations such as GE were doing well and their driving force was their continuous urge to do better, he added.

Partridge said that the battlefield for the corporate was in the mind and the key to success was in the strategy and not the planning. Often, strategies seemed to be evolving from planning, like in India but, the final goal was customer satisfaction and it could only be achieved through continuous adjustment to changing needs.

For Partridge, therefore, the central questions are -- how a corporation defines its market and then, in case the market is known, the kind of game the corporation is playing.

In some of the fundamental principles in corporate strategy, he felt, bigger organisations had a natural advantage over the smaller ones. However, bigger organisations should play according to a carefully thought-out strategy otherwise, they may lose their advantage.

He cited the example of IBM in this regard, which he felt lost its advantage after it decided to convert from proprietary architecture to open architecture technology.

According to him it was not only important to be big but also to be focussed on how to invest.

Partridge further said that what was important to keep a corporation alive was to ensure that it had a proper defence so that it could take on the offence of its competitors.

"Planning should come out of strategy", he said, "in order to have proper strategy it is important that the management is not just obsessed with control".

Partridge's second session comprised two fundamental games -- Prisoner's Dilemma and The Game of Chickens.