1. Introduction

Literary narratives frequently provide profound, microscopic laboratories for examining human decision-making under conditions of acute uncertainty, environmental volatility, and severe resource scarcity.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) presents such a laboratory through Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman enduring an eighty-four-day dry spell (salao). While literary scholarship has extensively analyzed themes of stoic endurance, Christian allegory, and ecological fatalism, the narrative offers an extraordinarily compact depiction of strategic management processes.

By analyzing Santiago’s voyage through the Resource-Based View (RBV), dynamic capabilities, and value creation–capture frameworks, this study demonstrates that competitive success cannot be judged solely by the acquisition of a valuable asset, but must encompass the ongoing capacity to preserve that value against hostile environmental forces.

2. Strategic Literature and Conceptual Gap

The Resource-Based View (RBV): Barney (1991) establishes that sustained competitive advantage rests on resources that are Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Non-substitutable (VRIN). Santiago’s deep, idiosyncratic knowledge of the Gulf Stream, line tension, and oceanic ecology constitutes quintessential tacit human capital.

Dynamic Capabilities: Teece et al. (1997; 2007) emphasize that competitive advantage requires dynamic sensing, seizing, and transforming. As Santiago's physical energy and gear deteriorate, he dynamically reconfigures depleted assets—converting an oar and knife into a makeshift spear.

The Research Gap: Traditional strategic literature focuses heavily on value creation (generating novelty) and value capture (appropriating profit margins). However, the downstream challenge of Value Preservation—safeguarding acquired value against predatory environmental competition—remains under-theorized.

3. Theoretical Framework: Two New Formulations

The Creation–Preservation Gap: The critical discrepancy between an actor's capacity to create and capture value and their subsequent capability to defend that value against predatory environmental hazards.

The Protective Resource Deficit: The structural imbalance occurring when the successful capture of a high-value asset dramatically increases external risk exposure without furnishing the requisite defensive resources. By capturing an eighteen-foot marlin, Santiago creates immense potential wealth, but its blood trail simultaneously summons aggressive sharks that his modest skiff cannot repel.

4. Qualitative Methodology

A systematic interpretive textual analysis was conducted across four distinct strategic episodes of the novella. Analytical categories were formalized as follows:

5. Managerial and Organizational Implications

1. Beware the Post-Capture Vulnerability ('The Shark Trail'): Enterprises that successfully capture major innovative breakthroughs often find themselves exposed to aggressive imitators and litigious incumbents without having prepared defensive supply chain or IP assets.

2. Dynamic Improvisation under Resource Depletion: When core assets fail, surviving organizations rely on uncodified, tacit employee experience to recombine remaining resources.

3. Full Lifecycle Valuation: Performance must be audited across the entire asset lifecycle. Capturing a prize asset yields zero economic return if the firm lacks the protective infrastructure to deliver it to market.

6. Conclusion

Santiago’s famous aphorism—'A man can be destroyed but not defeated'—captures the vital distinction between material value erosion and indestructible human capability.

Though the physical fish was consumed by sharks, Santiago’s underlying dynamic capability remained intact, proving that tacit experiential knowledge is the ultimate source of enduring strategic resilience.