Taken together, the organisation's external environment, internal context and core purpose form the basis of the its value proposition - which is an articulation of the organisation's strategic intent, in alignment with the notion of defining, creating and ultimately delivering superior value (shown by the value cycle displayed in the upper part of the diagram), on the basis of which the firm achieves competitive advantage through differentiation in its markets.

To that end, the Strategic Direction part dovetails with the both the GBE perspective (which informs about the organisation's - increasingly global - external environment) and the CFG perspective, which relentlessly seeks to understand and shed light on the organisation's ability (or disability!) to create superior value; with particular view to future value creation and managerial tasks related to that  objective.Strategic Direction might therefore be seen to be positioned between GBE (global macro-level analysis) and CFG (focused micro-level); though to be clear about this, SD is (also) positioned at the firm and therefore 'micro' -level. The first important task of strategy is about making sense of the organisation's external and internal competitive context; we call this strategic analysis. Its objective is to generate relevant insights through focussed issues analysis.