Mastering strategy is absolutely key for a manager. “One of the most important of a manager’s tasks consists in establishing the organization’s strategy—or in at least overseeing the process by which others and [the manager] develop strategy.”* Therefore, two main questions are on the minds of managers and board members: “Why do members become members and continue shopping at the co-op?” and “How can being a cooperative help us to attract and better serve our members?”
As far as we know, few studies on strategy have attempted to start from the standpoint of cooperative identity and propose approaches and analytical tools adapted to the cooperative reality. For cooperative managers, the available tools never truly reflect the reality of a collective undertaking focused on optimizing a user-
