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Strategic management
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Contents
[hide]

• 1 Processes
o 1.1 Strategy formulation
o 1.2 Strategy implementation
o 1.3 Strategy evaluation
 1.3.1 Suitability
 1.3.2 Feasibility
 1.3.3 Acceptability
• 2 General approaches
• 3 The strategy hierarchy
• 4 Historical development of strategic management
o 4.1 Birth of strategic management
o 4.2 Growth and portfolio theory
o 4.3 The marketing revolution
o 4.4 The Japanese challenge
o 4.5 Gaining competitive advantage
o 4.6 The military theorists
o 4.7 Strategic change
o 4.8 Information and technology driven strategy
• 5 The psychology of strategic management
• 6 Reasons why strategic plans fail
• 7 Limitations of strategic management
o 7.1 The Linearity Trap
• 8 References
• 9 Further reading
• 10 External links

• 11 See also

Strategic management is the art, science and craft of formulating, implementing and
evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-
term objectives[1]. It is the process of specifying the organization's mission, vision and
objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which
are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the
policies and plans, projects and programs. Strategic management seeks to coordinate and
integrate the activities of the various functional areas of a business in order to achieve
long-term organizational objectives. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the
overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives.
Strategic management is the highest level of managerial activity. Strategies are typically
planned, crafted or guided by the Chief Executive Officer, approved or authorized by the
Board of directors, and then implemented under the supervision of the organization's top
management team or senior executives. Strategic management provides overall direction
to the enterprise and is closely related to the field of Organization Studies. In the field of
business administration it is useful to talk about "strategic alignment" between the
organization and its environment or "strategic consistency". According to Arieu (2007),
"there is strategic consistency when the actions of an organization are consistent with the
expectations of management, and these in turn are with the market and the context."

“Strategic management is an ongoing process that evaluates and controls the business and the
industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies
to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or
quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded
or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new
competitors, a new economic environment., or a new social, financial, or political environment.”
(Lamb, 1984:ix)[2]

[edit] Processes
Strategic management is a combination of three main processes which are as follows (as
documented by Lemon Consulting)

[edit] Strategy formulation

• Performing a situation analysis, self-evaluation and competitor analysis: both

internal and external; both micro-environmental and macro-environmental.
• Concurrent with this assessment, objectives are set. These objectives should be
parallel to a timeline; some are in the short-term and others on the long-term. This
involves crafting vision statements (long term view of a possible future), mission
statements (the role that the organization gives itself in society), overall corporate
objectives (both financial and strategic), strategic business unit objectives (both
financial and strategic), and tactical objectives.
• These objectives should, in the light of the situation analysis, suggest a strategic
plan. The plan provides the details of how to achieve these objectives.

This three-step strategy formulation process is sometimes referred to as determining

where you are now, determining where you want to go, and then determining how to get
there. These three questions are the essence of strategic planning. I/O Economics for the
external factors and RBV for the internal factors.

[edit] Strategy implementation

• Allocation and management of sufficient resources (financial, personnel, time,

technology support)
 • Establishing a chain of command or some alternative structure (such as cross
functional teams)
• Assigning responsibility of specific tasks or processes to specific individuals or
groups
• It also involves managing the process. This includes monitoring results,
comparing to benchmarks and best practices, evaluating the efficacy and
efficiency of the process, controlling for variances, and making adjustments to the
process as necessary.
• When implementing specific programs, this involves acquiring the requisite
resources, developing the process, training, process testing, documentation, and
integration with (and/or conversion from) legacy processes.

Thus this type of problem can occur in strategy

In order for a policy to work, there must be a level of consistency from every person in an
organization, including from the management. This is what needs to occur on the tactical
level of management as well as strategic.

[edit] Strategy evaluation

• Measuring the effectiveness of the organizational strategy. It's extremely

important to conduct a SWOT analysis to figure out the strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats (both internal and external) of the entity in question.
This may require to take certain precautionary measures or even to change the
entire strategy.

In corporate strategy, Johnson and Scholes present a model in which strategic options are
evaluated against three key success criteria:

• Suitability (would it work?)

• Feasibility (can it be made to work?)
• Acceptability (will they work it?)

[edit] Suitability

Suitability deals with the overall rationale of the strategy. The key point to consider is
whether the strategy would address the key strategic issues underlined by the
organisation's strategic position.

• Does it make economic sense?

• Would the organisation obtain economies of scale, economies of scope or
experience economy?
• Would it be suitable in terms of environment and capabilities?

Tools that can be used to evaluate suitability include:

 • Ranking strategic options
• Decision trees
• What-if analysis

[edit] Feasibility

Feasibility is concerned with the resources required to implement the strategy are
available, can be developed or obtained. Resources include funding, people, time and
information.

Tools that can be used to evaluate feasibility include:

• cash flow analysis and forecasting

• break-even analysis
• resource deployment analysis

[edit] Acceptability

Acceptability is concerned with the expectations of the identified stakeholders (mainly

shareholders, employees and customers) with the expected performance outcomes, which
can be return, risk and stakeholder reactions.

• Return deals with the benefits expected by the stakeholders (financial and non-
financial). For example, shareholders would expect the increase of their wealth,
employees would expect improvement in their careers and customers would
expect better value for money.
• Risk deals with the probability and consequences of failure of a strategy
(financial and non-financial).
• Stakeholder reactions deals with anticipating the likely reaction of stakeholders.
Shareholders could oppose the issuing of new shares, employees and unions could
oppose outsourcing for fear of losing their jobs, customers could have concerns
over a merger with regards to quality and support.

Tools that can be used to evaluate acceptability include:

• what-if analysis
• stakeholder mapping

[edit] General approaches

In general terms, there are two main approaches, which are opposite but complement
each other in some ways, to strategic management:

• The Industrial Organizational Approach

 o based on economic theory — deals with issues like competitive rivalry,
resource allocation, economies of scale
o assumptions — rationality, self discipline behaviour, profit maximization
• The Sociological Approach
o deals primarily with human interactions
o assumptions — bounded rationality, satisfying behaviour, profit sub-
optimality. An example of a company that currently operates this way is
Google

Strategic management techniques can be viewed as bottom-up, top-down, or

collaborative processes. In the bottom-up approach, employees submit proposals to their
managers who, in turn, funnel the best ideas further up the organization. This is often
accomplished by a capital budgeting process. Proposals are assessed using financial
criteria such as return on investment or cost-benefit analysis. Cost underestimation and
benefit overestimation are major sources of error. The proposals that are approved form
the substance of a new strategy, all of which is done without a grand strategic design or a
strategic architect. The top-down approach is the most common by far. In it, the CEO,
possibly with the assistance of a strategic planning team, decides on the overall direction
the company should take. Some organizations are starting to experiment with
collaborative strategic planning techniques that recognize the emergent nature of strategic
decisions.

[edit] The strategy hierarchy

In most (large) corporations there are several levels of management. Strategic
management is the highest of these levels in the sense that it is the broadest - applying to
all parts of the firm - while also incorporating the longest time horizon. It gives direction
to corporate values, corporate culture, corporate goals, and corporate missions. Under this
broad corporate strategy there are typically business-level competitive strategies and
functional unit strategies.

Corporate strategy refers to the overarching strategy of the diversified firm. Such a
corporate strategy answers the questions of "in which businesses should we compete?"
and "how does being in these business create synergy and/or add to the competitive
advantage of the corporation as a whole?"

Business strategy refers to the aggregated strategies of single business firm or a strategic
business unit (SBU) in a diversified corporation. According to Michael Porter, a firm
must formulate a business strategy that incorporates either cost leadership, differentiation
or focus in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and long-term success in
its chosen arenas or industries.

Functional strategies include marketing strategies, new product development strategies,

human resource strategies, financial strategies, legal strategies, supply-chain strategies,
and information technology management strategies. The emphasis is on short and
medium term plans and is limited to the domain of each department’s functional
responsibility. Each functional department attempts to do its part in meeting overall
corporate objectives, and hence to some extent their strategies are derived from broader
corporate strategies.

Many companies feel that a functional organizational structure is not an efficient way to
organize activities so they have reengineered according to processes or SBUs. A strategic
business unit is a semi-autonomous unit that is usually responsible for its own budgeting,
new product decisions, hiring decisions, and price setting. An SBU is treated as an
internal profit centre by corporate headquarters.

An additional level of strategy called operational strategy was encouraged by Peter

Drucker in his theory of management by objectives (MBO). It is very narrow in focus and
deals with day-to-day operational activities such as scheduling criteria. It must operate
within a budget but is not at liberty to adjust or create that budget. Operational level
strategies are informed by business level strategies which, in turn, are informed by
corporate level strategies.

Since the turn of the millennium, some firms have reverted to a simpler strategic structure
driven by advances in information technology. It is felt that knowledge management
systems should be used to share information and create common goals. Strategic
divisions are thought to hamper this process. This notion of strategy has been captured
under the rubric of dynamic strategy, popularized by Carpenter and Sanders's textbook
[1]. This work builds on that of Brown and Eisenhart as well as Christensen and portrays
firm strategy, both business and corporate, as necessarily embracing ongoing strategic
change, and the seamless integration of strategy formulation and implementation. Such
change and implementation are usually built into the strategy through the staging and
pacing facets.

[edit] Historical development of strategic management

[edit] Birth of strategic management

Strategic management as a discipline originated in the 1950s and 60s. Although there
were numerous early contributors to the literature, the most influential pioneers were
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Philip Selznick, Igor Ansoff, and Peter Drucker.

Alfred Chandler recognized the importance of coordinating the various aspects of

management under one all-encompassing strategy. Prior to this time the various functions
of management were separate with little overall coordination or strategy. Interactions
between functions or between departments were typically handled by a boundary
position, that is, there were one or two managers that relayed information back and forth
between two departments. Chandler also stressed the importance of taking a long term
perspective when looking to the future. In his 1962 groundbreaking work Strategy and
Structure, Chandler showed that a long-term coordinated strategy was necessary to give a
company structure, direction, and focus. He says it concisely, “structure follows
strategy.”[3]
In 1957, Philip Selznick introduced the idea of matching the organization's internal
factors with external environmental circumstances.[4] This core idea was developed into
what we now call SWOT analysis by Learned, Andrews, and others at the Harvard
Business School General Management Group. Strengths and weaknesses of the firm are
assessed in light of the opportunities and threats from the business environment.

Igor Ansoff built on Chandler's work by adding a range of strategic concepts and
inventing a whole new vocabulary. He developed a strategy grid that compared market
penetration strategies, product development strategies, market development strategies and
horizontal and vertical integration and diversification strategies. He felt that management
could use these strategies to systematically prepare for future opportunities and
challenges. In his 1965 classic Corporate Strategy, he developed the gap analysis still
used today in which we must understand the gap between where we are currently and
where we would like to be, then develop what he called “gap reducing actions”.[5]

Peter Drucker was a prolific strategy theorist, author of dozens of management books,
with a career spanning five decades. His contributions to strategic management were
many but two are most important. Firstly, he stressed the importance of objectives. An
organization without clear objectives is like a ship without a rudder. As early as 1954 he
was developing a theory of management based on objectives.[6] This evolved into his
theory of management by objectives (MBO). According to Drucker, the procedure of
setting objectives and monitoring your progress towards them should permeate the entire
organization, top to bottom. His other seminal contribution was in predicting the
importance of what today we would call intellectual capital. He predicted the rise of what
he called the “knowledge worker” and explained the consequences of this for
management. He said that knowledge work is non-hierarchical. Work would be carried
out in teams with the person most knowledgeable in the task at hand being the temporary
leader.

In 1985, Ellen-Earle Chaffee summarized what she thought were the main elements of
strategic management theory by the 1970s:[7]

• Strategic management involves adapting the organization to its business

environment.
• Strategic management is fluid and complex. Change creates novel combinations
of circumstances requiring unstructured non-repetitive responses.
• Strategic management affects the entire organization by providing direction.
• Strategic management involves both strategy formation (she called it content) and
also strategy implementation (she called it process).
• Strategic management is partially planned and partially unplanned.
• Strategic management is done at several levels: overall corporate strategy, and
individual business strategies.
• Strategic management involves both conceptual and analytical thought processes.

[edit] Growth and portfolio theory

In the 1970s much of strategic management dealt with size, growth, and portfolio theory.
The PIMS study was a long term study, started in the 1960s and lasted for 19 years, that
attempted to understand the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies (PIMS), particularly
the effect of market share. Started at General Electric, moved to Harvard in the early
1970s, and then moved to the Strategic Planning Institute in the late 1970s, it now
contains decades of information on the relationship between profitability and strategy.
Their initial conclusion was unambiguous: The greater a company's market share, the
greater will be their rate of profit. The high market share provides volume and economies
of scale. It also provides experience and learning curve advantages. The combined effect
is increased profits.[8] The studies conclusions continue to be drawn on by academics and
companies today: "PIMS provides compelling quantitative evidence as to which business
strategies work and don't work" - Tom Peters.

The benefits of high market share naturally lead to an interest in growth strategies. The
relative advantages of horizontal integration, vertical integration, diversification,
franchises, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and organic growth were discussed.
The most appropriate market dominance strategies were assessed given the competitive
and regulatory environment.

There was also research that indicated that a low market share strategy could also be very
profitable. Schumacher (1973),[9] Woo and Cooper (1982),[10] Levenson (1984),[11] and
later Traverso (2002)[12] showed how smaller niche players obtained very high returns.

By the early 1980s the paradoxical conclusion was that high market share and low market
share companies were often very profitable but most of the companies in between were
not. This was sometimes called the “hole in the middle” problem. This anomaly would be
explained by Michael Porter in the 1980s.

The management of diversified organizations required new techniques and new ways of
thinking. The first CEO to address the problem of a multi-divisional company was Alfred
Sloan at General Motors. GM was decentralized into semi-autonomous “strategic
business units” (SBU's), but with centralized support functions.

One of the most valuable concepts in the strategic management of multi-divisional

companies was portfolio theory. In the previous decade Harry Markowitz and other
financial theorists developed the theory of portfolio analysis. It was concluded that a
broad portfolio of financial assets could reduce specific risk. In the 1970s marketers
extended the theory to product portfolio decisions and managerial strategists extended it
to operating division portfolios. Each of a company’s operating divisions were seen as an
element in the corporate portfolio. Each operating division (also called strategic business
units) was treated as a semi-independent profit center with its own revenues, costs,
objectives, and strategies. Several techniques were developed to analyze the relationships
between elements in a portfolio. B.C.G. Analysis, for example, was developed by the
Boston Consulting Group in the early 1970s. This was the theory that gave us the
wonderful image of a CEO sitting on a stool milking a cash cow. Shortly after that the
G.E. multi factoral model was developed by General Electric. Companies continued to
diversify until the 1980s when it was realized that in many cases a portfolio of operating
divisions was worth more as separate completely independent companies.

[edit] The marketing revolution

The 1970s also saw the rise of the marketing oriented firm. From the beginnings of
capitalism it was assumed that the key requirement of business success was a product of
high technical quality. If you produced a product that worked well and was durable, it
was assumed you would have no difficulty selling them at a profit. This was called the
production orientation and it was generally true that good products could be sold without
effort, encapsulated in the saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path
to your door." This was largely due to the growing numbers of affluent and middle class
people that capitalism had created. But after the untapped demand caused by the second
world war was saturated in the 1950s it became obvious that products were not selling as
easily as they had been. The answer was to concentrate on selling. The 1950s and 1960s
is known as the sales era and the guiding philosophy of business of the time is today
called the sales orientation. In the early 1970s Theodore Levitt and others at Harvard
argued that the sales orientation had things backward. They claimed that instead of
producing products then trying to sell them to the customer, businesses should start with
the customer, find out what they wanted, and then produce it for them. The customer
became the driving force behind all strategic business decisions. This marketing
orientation, in the decades since its introduction, has been reformulated and repackaged
under numerous names including customer orientation, marketing philosophy, customer
intimacy, customer focus, customer driven, and market focused.

[edit] The Japanese challenge

By the late 70s people had started to notice how successful Japanese industry had
become. In industry after industry, including steel, watches, ship building, cameras, autos,
and electronics, the Japanese were surpassing American and European companies.
Westerners wanted to know why. Numerous theories purported to explain the Japanese
success including:

• Higher employee morale, dedication, and loyalty;

• Lower cost structure, including wages;
• Effective government industrial policy;
• Modernization after WWII leading to high capital intensity and productivity;
• Economies of scale associated with increased exporting;
• Relatively low value of the Yen leading to low interest rates and capital costs, low
dividend expectations, and inexpensive exports;
• Superior quality control techniques such as Total Quality Management and other
systems introduced by W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s and 60s.[13]

Although there was some truth to all these potential explanations, there was clearly
something missing. In fact by 1980 the Japanese cost structure was higher than the
American. And post WWII reconstruction was nearly 40 years in the past. The first
management theorist to suggest an explanation was Richard Pascale.

In 1981 Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos in The Art of Japanese Management claimed
that the main reason for Japanese success was their superior management techniques.[14]
They divided management into 7 aspects (which are also known as McKinsey 7S
Framework): Strategy, Structure, Systems, Skills, Staff, Style, and Supraordinate goals
(which we would now call shared values). The first three of the 7 S's were called hard
factors and this is where American companies excelled. The remaining four factors
(skills, staff, style, and shared values) were called soft factors and were not well
understood by American businesses of the time (for details on the role of soft and hard
factors see Wickens P.D. 1995.) Americans did not yet place great value on corporate
culture, shared values and beliefs, and social cohesion in the workplace. In Japan the task
of management was seen as managing the whole complex of human needs, economic,
social, psychological, and spiritual. In America work was seen as something that was
separate from the rest of one's life. It was quite common for Americans to exhibit a very
different personality at work compared to the rest of their lives. Pascale also highlighted
the difference between decision making styles; hierarchical in America, and consensus in
Japan. He also claimed that American business lacked long term vision, preferring instead
to apply management fads and theories in a piecemeal fashion.

One year later The Mind of the Strategist was released in America by Kenichi Ohmae, the
head of McKinsey & Co.'s Tokyo office.[15] (It was originally published in Japan in 1975.)
He claimed that strategy in America was too analytical. Strategy should be a creative art:
It is a frame of mind that requires intuition and intellectual flexibility. He claimed that
Americans constrained their strategic options by thinking in terms of analytical
techniques, rote formula, and step-by-step processes. He compared the culture of Japan in
which vagueness, ambiguity, and tentative decisions were acceptable, to American
culture that valued fast decisions.

Also in 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman released a study that would respond to the
Japanese challenge head on.[16] Peters and Waterman, who had several years earlier
collaborated with Pascale and Athos at McKinsey & Co. asked “What makes an excellent
company?”. They looked at 62 companies that they thought were fairly successful. Each
was subject to six performance criteria. To be classified as an excellent company, it had to
be above the 50th percentile in 4 of the 6 performance metrics for 20 consecutive years.
Forty-three companies passed the test. They then studied these successful companies and
interviewed key executives. They concluded in In Search of Excellence that there were 8
keys to excellence that were shared by all 43 firms. They are:

• A bias for action — Do it. Try it. Don’t waste time studying it with multiple
reports and committees.
• Customer focus — Get close to the customer. Know your customer.
• Entrepreneurship — Even big companies act and think small by giving people the
authority to take initiatives.
 • Productivity through people — Treat your people with respect and they will
reward you with productivity.
• Value-oriented CEOs — The CEO should actively propagate corporate values
throughout the organization.
• Stick to the knitting — Do what you know well.
• Keep things simple and lean — Complexity encourages waste and confusion.
• Simultaneously centralized and decentralized — Have tight centralized control
while also allowing maximum individual autonomy.

The basic blueprint on how to compete against the Japanese had been drawn. But as J.E.
Rehfeld (1994) explains it is not a straight forward task due to differences in culture.[17] A
certain type of alchemy was required to transform knowledge from various cultures into a
management style that allows a specific company to compete in a globally diverse world.
He says, for example, that Japanese style kaizen (continuous improvement) techniques,
although suitable for people socialized in Japanese culture, have not been successful
when implemented in the U.S. unless they are modified significantly.

[edit] Gaining competitive advantage

The Japanese challenge shook the confidence of the western business elite, but detailed
comparisons of the two management styles and examinations of successful businesses
convinced westerners that they could overcome the challenge. The 1980s and early 1990s
saw a plethora of theories explaining exactly how this could be done. They cannot all be
detailed here, but some of the more important strategic advances of the decade are
explained below.

Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad declared that strategy needs to be more active and
interactive; less “arm-chair planning” was needed. They introduced terms like strategic
intent and strategic architecture.[18][19] Their most well known advance was the idea of
core competency. They showed how important it was to know the one or two key things
that your company does better than the competition.[20]

Active strategic management required active information gathering and active problem
solving. In the early days of Hewlett-Packard (H-P), Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett
devised an active management style that they called Management By Walking Around
(MBWA). Senior H-P managers were seldom at their desks. They spent most of their days
visiting employees, customers, and suppliers. This direct contact with key people
provided them with a solid grounding from which viable strategies could be crafted. The
MBWA concept was popularized in 1985 by a book by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin.[21]
Japanese managers employ a similar system, which originated at Honda, and is
sometimes called the 3 G's (Genba, Genbutsu, and Genjitsu, which translate into “actual
place”, “actual thing”, and “actual situation”).

Probably the most influential strategist of the decade was Michael Porter. He introduced
many new concepts including; 5 forces analysis, generic strategies, the value chain,
strategic groups, and clusters. In 5 forces analysis he identifies the forces that shape a
firm's strategic environment. It is like a SWOT analysis with structure and purpose. It
shows how a firm can use these forces to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage.
Porter modifies Chandler's dictum about structure following strategy by introducing a
second level of structure: Organizational structure follows strategy, which in turn follows
industry structure. Porter's generic strategies detail the interaction between cost
minimization strategies, product differentiation strategies, and market focus
strategies. Although he did not introduce these terms, he showed the importance of
choosing one of them rather than trying to position your company between them. He also
challenged managers to see their industry in terms of a value chain. A firm will be
successful only to the extent that it contributes to the industry's value chain. This forced
management to look at its operations from the customer's point of view. Every operation
should be examined in terms of what value it adds in the eyes of the final customer.

In 1993, John Kay took the idea of the value chain to a financial level claiming “ Adding
value is the central purpose of business activity”, where adding value is defined as the
difference between the market value of outputs and the cost of inputs including capital,
all divided by the firm's net output. Borrowing from Gary Hamel and Michael Porter,
Kay claims that the role of strategic management is to identify your core competencies,
and then assemble a collection of assets that will increase value added and provide a
competitive advantage. He claims that there are 3 types of capabilities that can do this;
innovation, reputation, and organizational structure.

The 1980s also saw the widespread acceptance of positioning theory. Although the theory
originated with Jack Trout in 1969, it didn’t gain wide acceptance until Al Ries and Jack
Trout wrote their classic book “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” (1979). The basic
premise is that a strategy should not be judged by internal company factors but by the
way customers see it relative to the competition. Crafting and implementing a strategy
involves creating a position in the mind of the collective consumer. Several techniques
were applied to positioning theory, some newly invented but most borrowed from other
disciplines. Perceptual mapping for example, creates visual displays of the relationships
between positions. Multidimensional scaling, discriminant analysis, factor analysis, and
conjoint analysis are mathematical techniques used to determine the most relevant
characteristics (called dimensions or factors) upon which positions should be based.
Preference regression can be used to determine vectors of ideal positions and cluster
analysis can identify clusters of positions.

Others felt that internal company resources were the key. In 1992, Jay Barney, for
example, saw strategy as assembling the optimum mix of resources, including human,
technology, and suppliers, and then configure them in unique and sustainable ways.[22]

Michael Hammer and James Champy felt that these resources needed to be
restructured.[23] This process, that they labeled reengineering, involved organizing a firm's
assets around whole processes rather than tasks. In this way a team of people saw a
project through, from inception to completion. This avoided functional silos where
isolated departments seldom talked to each other. It also eliminated waste due to
functional overlap and interdepartmental communications.
In 1989 Richard Lester and the researchers at the MIT Industrial Performance Center
identified seven best practices and concluded that firms must accelerate the shift away
from the mass production of low cost standardized products. The seven areas of best
practice were:[24]

• Simultaneous continuous improvement in cost, quality, service, and product

innovation
• Breaking down organizational barriers between departments
• Eliminating layers of management creating flatter organizational hierarchies.
• Closer relationships with customers and suppliers
• Intelligent use of new technology
• Global focus
• Improving human resource skills

The search for “best practices” is also called benchmarking.[25] This involves determining
where you need to improve, finding an organization that is exceptional in this area, then
studying the company and applying its best practices in your firm.

A large group of theorists felt the area where western business was most lacking was
product quality. People like W. Edwards Deming,[26] Joseph M. Juran,[27] A. Kearney,[28]
Philip Crosby,[29] and Armand Feignbaum[30] suggested quality improvement techniques
like Total Quality Management (TQM), continuous improvement, lean manufacturing,
Six Sigma, and Return on Quality (ROQ).

An equally large group of theorists felt that poor customer service was the problem.
People like James Heskett (1988),[31] Earl Sasser (1995), William Davidow,[32] Len
Schlesinger,[33] A. Paraurgman (1988), Len Berry,[34] Jane Kingman-Brundage,[35]
Christopher Hart, and Christopher Lovelock (1994), gave us fishbone diagramming,
service charting, Total Customer Service (TCS), the service profit chain, service gaps
analysis, the service encounter, strategic service vision, service mapping, and service
teams. Their underlying assumption was that there is no better source of competitive
advantage than a continuous stream of delighted customers.

Process management uses some of the techniques from product quality management and
some of the techniques from customer service management. It looks at an activity as a
sequential process. The objective is to find inefficiencies and make the process more
effective. Although the procedures have a long history, dating back to Taylorism, the
scope of their applicability has been greatly widened, leaving no aspect of the firm free
from potential process improvements. Because of the broad applicability of process
management techniques, they can be used as a basis for competitive advantage.

Some realized that businesses were spending much more on acquiring new customers
than on retaining current ones. Carl Sewell,[36] Frederick F. Reichheld,[37] C. Gronroos,[38]
and Earl Sasser[39] showed us how a competitive advantage could be found in ensuring
that customers returned again and again. This has come to be known as the loyalty effect
after Reicheld's book of the same name in which he broadens the concept to include
employee loyalty, supplier loyalty, distributor loyalty, and shareholder loyalty. They also
developed techniques for estimating the lifetime value of a loyal customer, called
customer lifetime value (CLV). A significant movement started that attempted to recast
selling and marketing techniques into a long term endeavor that created a sustained
relationship with customers (called relationship selling, relationship marketing, and
customer relationship management). Customer relationship management (CRM) software
(and its many variants) became an integral tool that sustained this trend.

James Gilmore and Joseph Pine found competitive advantage in mass customization.[40]
Flexible manufacturing techniques allowed businesses to individualize products for each
customer without losing economies of scale. This effectively turned the product into a
service. They also realized that if a service is mass customized by creating a
“performance” for each individual client, that service would be transformed into an
“experience”. Their book, The Experience Economy,[41] along with the work of Bernd
Schmitt convinced many to see service provision as a form of theatre. This school of
thought is sometimes referred to as customer experience management (CEM).

Like Peters and Waterman a decade earlier, James Collins and Jerry Porras spent years
conducting empirical research on what makes great companies. Six years of research
uncovered a key underlying principle behind the 19 successful companies that they
studied: They all encourage and preserve a core ideology that nurtures the company.
Even though strategy and tactics change daily, the companies, nevertheless, were able to
maintain a core set of values. These core values encourage employees to build an
organization that lasts. In Built To Last (1994) they claim that short term profit goals, cost
cutting, and restructuring will not stimulate dedicated employees to build a great
company that will endure.[42] In 2000 Collins coined the term “built to flip” to describe
the prevailing business attitudes in Silicon Valley. It describes a business culture where
technological change inhibits a long term focus. He also popularized the concept of the
BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal).

Arie de Geus (1997) undertook a similar study and obtained similar results. He identified
four key traits of companies that had prospered for 50 years or more. They are:

• Sensitivity to the business environment — the ability to learn and adjust

• Cohesion and identity — the ability to build a community with personality, vision,
and purpose
• Tolerance and decentralization — the ability to build relationships
• Conservative financing

A company with these key characteristics he called a living company because it is able to
perpetuate itself. If a company emphasizes knowledge rather than finance, and sees itself
as an ongoing community of human beings, it has the potential to become great and
endure for decades. Such an organization is an organic entity capable of learning (he
called it a “learning organization”) and capable of creating its own processes, goals, and
persona.
[edit] The military theorists

In the 1980s some business strategists realized that there was a vast knowledge base
stretching back thousands of years that they had barely examined. They turned to military
strategy for guidance. Military strategy books such as The Art of War by Sun Tzu, On
War by von Clausewitz, and The Red Book by Mao Zedong became instant business
classics. From Sun Tzu they learned the tactical side of military strategy and specific
tactical prescriptions. From Von Clausewitz they learned the dynamic and unpredictable
nature of military strategy. From Mao Zedong they learned the principles of guerrilla
warfare. The main marketing warfare books were:

• Business War Games by Barrie James, 1984

• Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout, 1986
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts, 1987

Philip Kotler was a well-known proponent of marketing warfare strategy.

There were generally thought to be four types of business warfare theories. They are:

• Offensive marketing warfare strategies

• Defensive marketing warfare strategies
• Flanking marketing warfare strategies
• Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies

The marketing warfare literature also examined leadership and motivation, intelligence
gathering, types of marketing weapons, logistics, and communications.

By the turn of the century marketing warfare strategies had gone out of favour. It was felt
that they were limiting. There were many situations in which non-confrontational
approaches were more appropriate. The “Strategy of the Dolphin” was developed in the
mid 1990s to give guidance as to when to use aggressive strategies and when to use
passive strategies. A variety of aggressiveness strategies were developed.

In 1993, J. Moore used a similar metaphor.[43] Instead of using military terms, he created
an ecological theory of predators and prey (see ecological model of competition), a sort
of Darwinian management strategy in which market interactions mimic long term
ecological stability.

[edit] Strategic change

In 1970, Alvin Toffler in Future Shock described a trend towards accelerating rates of
change.[44] He illustrated how social and technological norms had shorter lifespans with
each generation, and he questioned society's ability to cope with the resulting turmoil and
anxiety. In past generations periods of change were always punctuated with times of
stability. This allowed society to assimilate the change and deal with it before the next
change arrived. But these periods of stability are getting shorter and by the late 20th
century had all but disappeared. In 1980 in The Third Wave, Toffler characterized this
shift to relentless change as the defining feature of the third phase of civilization (the first
two phases being the agricultural and industrial waves).[45] He claimed that the dawn of
this new phase will cause great anxiety for those that grew up in the previous phases, and
will cause much conflict and opportunity in the business world. Hundreds of authors,
particularly since the early 1990s, have attempted to explain what this means for business
strategy.

In 1997, Watts Waker and Jim Taylor called this upheaval a "500 year delta."[46] They
claimed these major upheavals occur every 5 centuries. They said we are currently
making the transition from the “Age of Reason” to a new chaotic Age of Access. Jeremy
Rifkin (2000) popularized and expanded this term, “age of access” three years later in his
book of the same name.[47]

In 1968, Peter Drucker (1969) coined the phrase Age of Discontinuity to describe the
way change forces disruptions into the continuity of our lives.[48] In an age of continuity
attempts to predict the future by extrapolating from the past can be somewhat accurate.
But according to Drucker, we are now in an age of discontinuity and extrapolating from
the past is hopelessly ineffective. We cannot assume that trends that exist today will
continue into the future. He identifies four sources of discontinuity: new technologies,
globalization, cultural pluralism, and knowledge capital.

In 2000, Gary Hamel discussed strategic decay, the notion that the value of all strategies,
no matter how brilliant, decays over time.[49]

In 1978, Dereck Abell (Abell, D. 1978) described strategic windows and stressed the
importance of the timing (both entrance and exit) of any given strategy. This has led some
strategic planners to build planned obsolescence into their strategies.[50]

In 1989, Charles Handy identified two types of change.[51] Strategic drift is a gradual
change that occurs so subtly that it is not noticed until it is too late. By contrast,
transformational change is sudden and radical. It is typically caused by discontinuities
(or exogenous shocks) in the business environment. The point where a new trend is
initiated is called a strategic inflection point by Andy Grove. Inflection points can be
subtle or radical.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the importance of the tipping point, that point
where a trend or fad acquires critical mass and takes off.[52]

In 1983, Noel Tichy recognized that because we are all beings of habit we tend to repeat
what we are comfortable with.[53] He wrote that this is a trap that constrains our creativity,
prevents us from exploring new ideas, and hampers our dealing with the full complexity
of new issues. He developed a systematic method of dealing with change that involved
looking at any new issue from three angles: technical and production, political and
resource allocation, and corporate culture.
In 1990, Richard Pascale (Pascale, R. 1990) wrote that relentless change requires that
businesses continuously reinvent themselves.[54] His famous maxim is “Nothing fails like
success” by which he means that what was a strength yesterday becomes the root of
weakness today, We tend to depend on what worked yesterday and refuse to let go of
what worked so well for us in the past. Prevailing strategies become self-confirming. In
order to avoid this trap, businesses must stimulate a spirit of inquiry and healthy debate.
They must encourage a creative process of self renewal based on constructive conflict.

In 1996, Art Kleiner (1996) claimed that to foster a corporate culture that embraces
change, you have to hire the right people; heretics, heroes, outlaws, and visionaries[55].
The conservative bureaucrat that made such a good middle manager in yesterday’s
hierarchical organizations is of little use today. A decade earlier Peters and Austin (1985)
had stressed the importance of nurturing champions and heroes. They said we have a
tendency to dismiss new ideas, so to overcome this, we should support those few people
in the organization that have the courage to put their career and reputation on the line for
an unproven idea.

In 1996, Adrian Slywotsky showed how changes in the business environment are
reflected in value migrations between industries, between companies, and within
companies.[56] He claimed that recognizing the patterns behind these value migrations is
necessary if we wish to understand the world of chaotic change. In “Profit Patterns”
(1999) he described businesses as being in a state of strategic anticipation as they try to
spot emerging patterns. Slywotsky and his team identified 30 patterns that have
transformed industry after industry.[57]

In 1997, Clayton Christensen (1997) took the position that great companies can fail
precisely because they do everything right since the capabilities of the organization also
defines its disabilities.[58] Christensen's thesis is that outstanding companies lose their
market leadership when confronted with disruptive technology. He called the approach
to discovering the emerging markets for disruptive technologies agnostic marketing, i.e.,
marketing under the implicit assumption that no one - not the company, not the customers
- can know how or in what quantities a disruptive product can or will be used before they
have experience using it.

A number of strategists use scenario planning techniques to deal with change. Kees van
der Heijden (1996), for example, says that change and uncertainty make “optimum
strategy” determination impossible. We have neither the time nor the information
required for such a calculation. The best we can hope for is what he calls “the most
skillful process”.[59] The way Peter Schwartz put it in 1991 is that strategic outcomes
cannot be known in advance so the sources of competitive advantage cannot be
predetermined.[60] The fast changing business environment is too uncertain for us to find
sustainable value in formulas of excellence or competitive advantage. Instead, scenario
planning is a technique in which multiple outcomes can be developed, their implications
assessed, and their likeliness of occurrence evaluated. According to Pierre Wack, scenario
planning is about insight, complexity, and subtlety, not about formal analysis and
numbers.[61]
In 1988, Henry Mintzberg looked at the changing world around him and decided it was
time to reexamine how strategic management was done.[62][63] He examined the strategic
process and concluded it was much more fluid and unpredictable than people had
thought. Because of this, he could not point to one process that could be called strategic
planning. Instead he concludes that there are five types of strategies. They are:

• Strategy as plan - a direction, guide, course of action - intention rather than actual
• Strategy as ploy - a maneuver intended to outwit a competitor
• Strategy as pattern - a consistent pattern of past behaviour - realized rather than
intended
• Strategy as position - locating of brands, products, or companies within the
conceptual framework of consumers or other stakeholders - strategy determined
primarily by factors outside the firm
• Strategy as perspective - strategy determined primarily by a master strategist

In 1998, Mintzberg developed these five types of management strategy into 10 “schools
of thought”. These 10 schools are grouped into three categories. The first group is
prescriptive or normative. It consists of the informal design and conception school, the
formal planning school, and the analytical positioning school. The second group,
consisting of six schools, is more concerned with how strategic management is actually
done, rather than prescribing optimal plans or positions. The six schools are the
entrepreneurial, visionary, or great leader school, the cognitive or mental process school,
the learning, adaptive, or emergent process school, the power or negotiation school, the
corporate culture or collective process school, and the business environment or reactive
school. The third and final group consists of one school, the configuration or
transformation school, an hybrid of the other schools organized into stages,
organizational life cycles, or “episodes”.[64]

In 1999, Constantinos Markides also wanted to reexamine the nature of strategic planning
itself.[65] He describes strategy formation and implementation as an on-going, never-
ending, integrated process requiring continuous reassessment and reformation. Strategic
management is planned and emergent, dynamic, and interactive. J. Moncrieff (1999) also
stresses strategy dynamics.[66] He recognized that strategy is partially deliberate and
partially unplanned. The unplanned element comes from two sources: emergent
strategies (result from the emergence of opportunities and threats in the environment)
and Strategies in action (ad hoc actions by many people from all parts of the
organization).

Some business planners are starting to use a complexity theory approach to strategy.
Complexity can be thought of as chaos with a dash of order. Chaos theory deals with
turbulent systems that rapidly become disordered. Complexity is not quite so
unpredictable. It involves multiple agents interacting in such a way that a glimpse of
structure may appear. Axelrod, R.,[67] Holland, J.,[68] and Kelly, S. and Allison, M.A.,[69]
call these systems of multiple actions and reactions complex adaptive systems. Axelrod
asserts that rather than fear complexity, business should harness it. He says this can best
be done when “there are many participants, numerous interactions, much trial and error
learning, and abundant attempts to imitate each others' successes”. In 2000, E. Dudik
wrote that an organization must develop a mechanism for understanding the source and
level of complexity it will face in the future and then transform itself into a complex
adaptive system in order to deal with it.[70]

[edit] Information and technology driven strategy

Peter Drucker had theorized the rise of the “knowledge worker” back in the 1950s. He
described how fewer workers would be doing physical labor, and more would be
applying their minds. In 1984, John Nesbitt theorized that the future would be driven
largely by information: companies that managed information well could obtain an
advantage, however the profitability of what he calls the “information float” (information
that the company had and others desired) would all but disappear as inexpensive
computers made information more accessible.

Daniel Bell (1985) examined the sociological consequences of information technology,

while Gloria Schuck and Shoshana Zuboff looked at psychological factors.[71] Zuboff, in
her five year study of eight pioneering corporations made the important distinction
between “automating technologies” and “infomating technologies”. She studied the effect
that both had on individual workers, managers, and organizational structures. She largely
confirmed Peter Drucker's predictions three decades earlier, about the importance of
flexible decentralized structure, work teams, knowledge sharing, and the central role of
the knowledge worker. Zuboff also detected a new basis for managerial authority, based
not on position or hierarchy, but on knowledge (also predicted by Drucker) which she
called “participative management”.[72]

In 1990, Peter Senge, who had collaborated with Arie de Geus at Dutch Shell, borrowed
de Geus' notion of the learning organization, expanded it, and popularized it. The
underlying theory is that a company's ability to gather, analyze, and use information is a
necessary requirement for business success in the information age. (See organizational
learning.) In order to do this, Senge claimed that an organization would need to be
structured such that:[73]

• People can continuously expand their capacity to learn and be productive,

• New patterns of thinking are nurtured,
• Collective aspirations are encouraged, and
• People are encouraged to see the “whole picture” together.

Senge identified five components of a learning organization. They are:

• Personal responsibility, self reliance, and mastery — We accept that we are the
masters of our own destiny. We make decisions and live with the consequences of
them. When a problem needs to be fixed, or an opportunity exploited, we take the
initiative to learn the required skills to get it done.
• Mental models — We need to explore our personal mental models to understand
the subtle effect they have on our behaviour.
 • Shared vision — The vision of where we want to be in the future is discussed and
communicated to all. It provides guidance and energy for the journey ahead.
• Team learning — We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from “a spirit
of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry”.
• Systems thinking — We look at the whole rather than the parts. This is what
Senge calls the “Fifth discipline”. It is the glue that integrates the other four into a
coherent strategy. For an alternative approach to the “learning organization”, see
Garratt, B. (1987).

Since 1990 many theorists have written on the strategic importance of information,
including J.B. Quinn,[74] J. Carlos Jarillo,[75] D.L. Barton,[76] Manuel Castells,[77] J.P.
Lieleskin,[78] Thomas Stewart,[79] K.E. Sveiby,[80] Gilbert J. Probst,[81] and Shapiro and
Varian[82] to name just a few.

Thomas A. Stewart, for example, uses the term intellectual capital to describe the
investment an organization makes in knowledge. It is comprised of human capital (the
knowledge inside the heads of employees), customer capital (the knowledge inside the
heads of customers that decide to buy from you), and structural capital (the knowledge
that resides in the company itself).

Manuel Castells, describes a network society characterized by: globalization,

organizations structured as a network, instability of employment, and a social divide
between those with access to information technology and those without.

Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer (1998) have combined three variables to define what
they call the BLUR equation. The speed of change, Internet connectivity, and intangible
knowledge value, when multiplied together yields a society's rate of BLUR. The three
variables interact and reinforce each other making this relationship highly non-linear.

Regis McKenna posits that life in the high tech information age is what he called a “real
time experience”. Events occur in real time. To ever more demanding customers “now” is
what matters. Pricing will more and more become variable pricing changing with each
transaction, often exhibiting first degree price discrimination. Customers expect
immediate service, customized to their needs, and will be prepared to pay a premium
price for it. He claimed that the new basis for competition will be time based
competition.[83]

Geoffrey Moore (1991) and R. Frank and P. Cook[84] also detected a shift in the nature of
competition. In industries with high technology content, technical standards become
established and this gives the dominant firm a near monopoly. The same is true of
networked industries in which interoperability requires compatibility between users. An
example is word processor documents. Once a product has gained market dominance,
other products, even far superior products, cannot compete. Moore showed how firms
could attain this enviable position by using E.M. Rogers five stage adoption process and
focusing on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to
the next group. The most difficult step is making the transition between visionaries and
pragmatists (See Crossing the Chasm). If successful a firm can create a bandwagon effect
in which the momentum builds and your product becomes a de facto standard.

Evans and Wurster describe how industries with a high information component are being
transformed.[85] They cite Encarta's demolition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (whose
sales have plummeted 80% since their peak of $650 million in 1990). Many speculate
that Encarta’s reign will be short-lived, eclipsed by collaborative encyclopedias like
Wikipedia that can operate at very low marginal costs. Evans also mentions the music
industry which is desperately looking for a new business model. The upstart information
savvy firms, unburdened by cumbersome physical assets, are changing the competitive
landscape, redefining market segments, and disintermediating some channels. One
manifestation of this is personalized marketing. Information technology allows marketers
to treat each individual as its own market, a market of one. Traditional ideas of market
segments will no longer be relevant if personalized marketing is successful.

The technology sector has provided some strategies directly. For example, from the
software development industry agile software development provides a model for shared
development processes.

Access to information systems have allowed senior managers to take a much more
comprehensive view of strategic management than ever before. The most notable of the
comprehensive systems is the balanced scorecard approach developed in the early 1990s
by Drs. Robert S. Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton (Kaplan, R. and
Norton, D. 1992). It measures several factors financial, marketing, production,
organizational development, and new product development in order to achieve a
'balanced' perspective.

[edit] The psychology of strategic management

Several psychologists have conducted studies to determine the psychological patterns
involved in strategic management. Typically senior managers have been asked how they
go about making strategic decisions. A 1938 treatise by Chester Barnard, that was based
on his own experience as a business executive, sees the process as informal, intuitive,
non-routinized, and involving primarily oral, 2-way communications. Bernard says “The
process is the sensing of the organization as a whole and the total situation relevant to it.
It transcends the capacity of merely intellectual methods, and the techniques of
discriminating the factors of the situation. The terms pertinent to it are “feeling”,
“judgement”, “sense”, “proportion”, “balance”, “appropriateness”. It is a matter of art
rather than science.”[86]

In 1973, Henry Mintzberg found that senior managers typically deal with unpredictable
situations so they strategize in ad hoc, flexible, dynamic, and implicit ways. He says,
“The job breeds adaptive information-manipulators who prefer the live concrete situation.
The manager works in an environment of stimulous-response, and he develops in his
work a clear preference for live action.”[87]
In 1982, John Kotter studied the daily activities of 15 executives and concluded that they
spent most of their time developing and working a network of relationships from which
they gained general insights and specific details to be used in making strategic decisions.
They tended to use “mental road maps” rather than systematic planning techniques.[88]

Daniel Isenberg's 1984 study of senior managers found that their decisions were highly
intuitive. Executives often sensed what they were going to do before they could explain
why.[89] He claimed in 1986 that one of the reasons for this is the complexity of strategic
decisions and the resultant information uncertainty.[90]

Shoshana Zuboff (1988) claims that information technology is widening the divide
between senior managers (who typically make strategic decisions) and operational level
managers (who typically make routine decisions). She claims that prior to the widespread
use of computer systems, managers, even at the most senior level, engaged in both
strategic decisions and routine administration, but as computers facilitated (She called it
“deskilled”) routine processes, these activities were moved further down the hierarchy,
leaving senior management free for strategic decions making.

In 1977, Abraham Zaleznik identified a difference between leaders and managers. He

describes leadershipleaders as visionaries who inspire. They care about substance.
Whereas managers are claimed to care about process, plans, and form.[91] He also claimed
in 1989 that the rise of the manager was the main factor that caused the decline of
American business in the 1970s and 80s. Lack of leadership is most damaging at the level
of strategic management where it can paralyze an entire organization.[92]

According to Corner, Kinichi, and Keats,[93] strategic decision making in organizations

occurs at two levels: individual and aggregate. They have developed a model of parallel
strategic decision making. The model identifies two parallel processes both of which
involve getting attention, encoding information, storage and retrieval of information,
strategic choice, strategic outcome, and feedback. The individual and organizational
processes are not independent however. They interact at each stage of the process.

[edit] Reasons why strategic plans fail

There are many reasons why strategic plans fail, especially:

• Failure to understand the customer

o Why do they buy
o Is there a real need for the product
o inadequate or incorrect marketing research
• Inability to predict environmental reaction
o What will competitors do
 Fighting brands
 Price wars
o Will government intervene
• Over-estimation of resource competence
 o Can the staff, equipment, and processes handle the new strategy
o Failure to develop new employee and management skills
• Failure to coordinate
o Reporting and control relationships not adequate
o Organizational structure not flexible enough
• Failure to obtain senior management commitment
o Failure to get management involved right from the start
o Failure to obtain sufficient company resources to accomplish task
• Failure to obtain employee commitment
o New strategy not well explained to employees
o No incentives given to workers to embrace the new strategy
• Under-estimation of time requirements
o No critical path analysis done
• Failure to follow the plan
o No follow through after initial planning
o No tracking of progress against plan
o No consequences for above
• Failure to manage change
o Inadequate understanding of the internal resistance to change
o Lack of vision on the relationships between processes, technology and
organization
• Poor communications
o Insufficient information sharing among stakeholders
o Exclusion of stakeholders and delegates

[edit] Limitations of strategic management

Although a sense of direction is important, it can also stifle creativity, especially if it is
rigidly enforced. In an uncertain and ambiguous world, fluidity can be more important
than a finely tuned strategic compass. When a strategy becomes internalized into a
corporate culture, it can lead to group think. It can also cause an organization to define
itself too narrowly. An example of this is marketing myopia.

Many theories of strategic management tend to undergo only brief periods of popularity.
A summary of these theories thus inevitably exhibits survivorship bias (itself an area of
research in strategic management). Many theories tend either to be too narrow in focus to
build a complete corporate strategy on, or too general and abstract to be applicable to
specific situations. Populism or faddishness can have an impact on a particular theory's
life cycle and may see application in inappropriate circumstances. See business
philosophies and popular management theories for a more critical view of management
theories.

In 2000, Gary Hamel coined the term strategic convergence to explain the limited scope
of the strategies being used by rivals in greatly differing circumstances. He lamented that
strategies converge more than they should, because the more successful ones get imitated
by firms that do not understand that the strategic process involves designing a custom
strategy for the specifics of each situation.[94]

Ram Charan, aligning with a popular marketing tagline, believes that strategic planning
must not dominate action. "Just do it!", while not quite what he meant, is a phrase that
nevertheless comes to mind when combatting analysis paralysis.

[edit] The Linearity Trap

It is tempting to think that the elements of strategic management – (i) reaching consensus
on corporate objectives; (ii) developing a plan for achieving the objectives; and (iii)
marshalling and allocating the resources required to implement the plan – can be
approached sequentially. It would be convenient, in other words, if one could deal first
with the noble question of ends, and then address the mundane question of means.

But in the world in which strategies have to be implemented, the three elements are
interdependent. Means are as likely to determine ends as ends are to determine means.[95]
The objectives that an organization might wish to pursue are limited by the range of
feasible approaches to implementation. (There will usually be only a small number of
approaches that will not only be technically and administratively possible, but also
satisfactory to the full range of organizational stakeholders.) In turn, the range of feasible
implementation approaches is determined by the availability of resources.

And so, although participants in a typical “strategy session” may be asked to do “blue
sky” thinking where they pretend that the usual constraints – resources, acceptability to
stakeholders , administrative feasibility – have been lifted, the fact is that it rarely makes
sense to divorce oneself from the environment in which a strategy will have to be
implemented. It’s probably impossible to think in any meaningful way about strategy in
an unconstrained environment. Our brains can’t process “boundless possibilities”, and the
very idea of strategy only has meaning in the context of challenges or obstacles to be
overcome. It’s at least as plausible to argue that acute awareness of constraints is the very
thing that stimulates creativity by forcing us to constantly reassess both means and ends
in light of circumstances.

The key question, then, is, "How can individuals, organizations and societies cope as well
as possible with ... issues too complex to be fully understood, given the fact that actions
initiated on the basis of inadequate understanding may lead to significant regret?"[96]

The answer is that the process of developing organizational strategy must be iterative. It
involves toggling back and forth between questions about objectives, implementation
planning and resources. An initial idea about corporate objectives may have to be altered
if there is no feasible implementation plan that will meet with a sufficient level of
acceptance among the full range of stakeholders, or because the necessary resources are
not available, or both.
Even the most talented manager would no doubt agree that "comprehensive analysis is
impossible" for complex problems[97]. Formulation and implementation of strategy must
thus occur side-by-side rather than sequentially, because strategies are built on
assumptions which, in the absence of perfect knowledge, will never be perfectly correct.
Strategic management is necessarily a "repetitive learning cycle [rather than] a linear
progression towards a clearly defined final destination."[98] While assumptions can and
should be tested in advance, the ultimate test is implementation. You will inevitably need
to adjust corporate objectives and/or your approach to pursuing outcomes and/or
assumptions about required resources. Thus a strategy will get remade during
implementation because "humans rarely can proceed satisfactorily except by learning
from experience; and modest probes, serially modified on the basis of feedback, usually
are the best method for such learning."[99]

It serves little purpose (other than to provide a false aura of certainty sometimes
demanded by corporate strategists and planners) to pretend to anticipate every possible
consequence of a corporate decision, every possible constraining or enabling factor, and
every possible point of view. At the end of the day, what matters for the purposes of
strategic management is having a clear view – based on the best available evidence and
on defensible assumptions – of what it seems possible to accomplish within the
constraints of a given set of circumstances. As the situation changes, some opportunities
for pursuing objectives will disappear and others arise. Some implementation approaches
will become impossible, while others, previously impossible or unimagined, will become
viable.

The essence of being “strategic” thus lies in a capacity for "intelligent trial-and error"[100]
rather than linear adherence to finally honed and detailed strategic plans. Strategic
management will add little value -- indeed, it may well do harm -- if organizational
strategies are designed to be used as a detailed blueprints for managers. Strategy should
be seen, rather, as laying out the general path - but not the precise steps - by which an
organization intends to create value.[101]Strategic management is a question of
interpreting, and continuously reinterpreting, the possibilities presented by shifting
circumstances for advancing an organization's objectives. Doing so requires strategists to
think simultaneously about desired objectives, the best approach for achieving them, and
the resources implied by the chosen approach. It requires a frame of mind that admits of
no boundary between means and ends.