What makes firms succeed or fail has preoccupied the strategy field since its inception four decades ago. Inextricably bound up in questions such as why firms differ, how they behave, how they design strategy and how they are managed, the reasons why firms succeed or fail are often raised. Yet, despite the considerable progress in developing static models that explain competitive success, far less developed is our understanding of the dynamic processes by which firms perceive and attain superior competitive positions over time (Porter 1991). The traditional answers of strategy research to why firms succeed or fail embody crucial assumptions about the nature of firms and the business environment. The rationality assumption, for example, used to be the defining characteristic of economics (Lucas, 1986). During the last twenty years, however, at least five monkey wrenches have been thrown at the economist's neoclassical model of the firm. They are: uncertainty, information asymmetry, bounded rationality, opportunism and asset specificity. These phenomena violate crucial axioms in the neoclassical model of the firm a smoothly running machine in a world without secrets, without friction or uncertainty, and without a time dimension (Rumelt, Schendel, & Teece, 1991).

Proponents of the cross-sectional strategy perspective continue framing the determinants of superior firm performance as a static chain causality, assuming that the dynamic processes pertinent to creating competitive positions are logically posterior to such a chain. So, the argument goes, to understand the dynamics of strategy, one must move further back in the static chain of causality. The cross sectional view also highlights the managerial choices often lying behind the initial conditions internal to firms, the distinctive competencies (Selznick, 1957) and competitive positions of which result from past decisions that entail hard-to-reverse commitments (Ghemawat, 1991). Ghemawat posits that the analysis of such decisions should begin with cross-sectional models but, in choosing competitive positions, he stresses the need to examine their sustainability over time as well as the effect of uncertainty on the chosen investments. Ghemawat brings a broader perspective on sustainability than is generally present in, say, game theory models. Brams' (1993) essay is one exception in game theory that interjects time to assess outcome sustainability. Sustainability is relevant to system dynamics because of its proximity to scenario-driven planning, which allows assessing resource investment decisions from a strategic perspective while, at once, bounding strategic uncertainty to create informational asymmetries, ie. good managerial choices (Amara & Lipinski, 1983; Georgantzas & Acar, 1994; Godet, 1987; Porter, 1985).