Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

34. Chan W. Kim and Renee Mauborgne, “How Strategy Shapes Structure,” Harvard Business Review (September 2009), 73–80.

  35. Eric D. Beinhocker, “Strategy at the Edge of Chaos,” McKinsey Quarterly (Winter 1997), 25–39.

  34 The Sociological Challenge

  1. James A. C. Brown, The Social Psychology of Industry (London: Penguin Books, 1954).

  2. Douglas McGregor. The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). See also Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens, Douglas McGregor Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise (New York: Wiley, 2000).

  3. Cited in David Jacobs, “Book Review Essay: Douglas McGregor? The Human Side of Enterprise in Peril,” Academy of Management Review 29, no. 2 (2004): 293–311.

  4. These are discussed below, p. 592.

  5. Karl Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 91.

  6. Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, and Julian Phillips, “Structure Is Not Organization,” Business Horizons, June 1980. Peters’s account comes from Tom Peters, “A Brief History of the 7-S (‘McKinsey 7-S’) Model,” January 2011, available at http://www.tompeters.com/dispatches/012016.php.

  7. Richard T. Pascale and Anthony Athos, The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981).

  8. Kenichi Ohmae, The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).

  9. It was originally going to be called The Secrets of Excellence, but McKinsey’s were worried that would sound like they were giving away the secrets of clients.

  10. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 1982).

  11. Tom Peters, “Tom Peters’s True Confessions,” Fast Company.com, November 30, 2001, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/53/peters.html. On Tom Peters, see Stuart Crainer, The Tom Peters Phenomenon: Corporate Man to Corporate Skink (Oxford: Capstone, 1997).

  12. Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence, 29.

  13. D. Colville, Robert H. Waterman, and Karl E. Weick, “Organization and the Search for Excellence: Making Sense of the Times in Theory and Practice,” Organization 6, no. 1 (February 1999): 129–148.

  14. Daniel Carroll, “A Disappointing Search for Excellence,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1983, 78–88.

  15. “Oops. Who’s Excellent Now?” Business Week, November 5, 1984. The book did note that of its “excellent companies most probably will not stay buoyant forever” (pp. 109–10), and a number did actually show considerable endurance.

  16. Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992).

  17. Tom Peters, Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (New York: DK Publishing, 2003), 203.

  18. “Guru: Tom Peters,” The Economist, March 5, 2009. Tom Peters with N. Austin, A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (London: Collins, 1985); Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

  19. Stewart, The Management Myth, 234.

  20. “Peter Drucker, the Man Who Changed the World,” Business Review Weekly, September 15, 1997, 49.

  21. C. K. Prahalad and G. Hamel, “Strategic Intent,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1989), 63–76.

  22. C. K. Prahalad and G. Hamel, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1990), 79–91.

  23. C. K. Prahalad and G. Hamel, “Strategy as a Field of Study: Why Search for a New Paradigm?” Strategic Management Journal 15, issue supplement S2 (Summer 1994): 5–16.

  24. Gary Hamel, “Strategy as Revolution,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 1996), 69.

  25. Cited in Ibid., 78.

  26. Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

  27. Mintzberg somewhat gleefully includes an embarrassing interview conducted by Hamel with Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay in Strategy Bites Back.

  28. Hamel was not the only author to identify Enron as the model for the future. The Financial Times observed on December 4, 2001: “The books of various gurus have singled out the company as paragon of good management, for LEADING THE REVOLUTION (Gary Hamel, 2000), practising CREATIVE DESTRUCTION (Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, 2001), devising STRATEGY THROUGH SIMPLE RULES (Kathy Eisenhardt and Donald Sull, 2001), winning the WAR FOR TALENT (Ed Michaels, 1998) and Navigating the ROAD TO THE NEXT ECONOMY (James Critin, scheduled for publication in February 2002—and now, presumably being rewritten).”

  29. Gary Hamel, The Future of Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), 14.

  30. Ibid., 62.

  31. Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012).

  32. Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 153, 296. The strips which describe strategy are available on http://www.dilbert.com/strips/.

  35 Deliberate or Emergent

  1. Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic Management Journal 6, no. 3 (July–September 1985): 257–272.

  2. Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2008.

  3. Henry Mintzberg, “Rebuilding Companies as Communities,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2009, 140–143.

  4. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

  5. Daniel Quinn Mills and Bruce Friesen, “The Learning Organization,” European Management Journal 10, no. 2 (June 1992): 146–156.

  6. Charles Handy, “Managing the Dream,” in S. Chawla and J. Renesch, eds., Learning Organizations (Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1995), 46, cited in Michaela Driver, “The Learning Organization: Foucauldian Gloom or Utopian Sunshine?” Human Relations 55 (2002): 33–53.

  7. Robert C. H. Chia and Robin Holt, Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 203.

  8. Although Liddell Hart (as the prophet of the indirect approach) and Luttwak (as the celebrator of strategy as paradox) were called in aid, and both certainly argued against direct frontal approaches, neither suggested that somehow military success could be achieved by purposeless activity, seeing how the individuals in an army coped with the predicaments in which they found themselves (which without any direction would probably have been to surrender or desert). Indirect strategies in war required imaginative leadership and an ability to consider the world as it might appear to the enemy before embarking on maneuvers that could carry high risks.

  9. Chia and Holt, Strategy Without Design, xi.

  10. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992). His definition of power was “the potential ability to influence behavior, to change the course of events, to overcome resistance, and to get people to do things they would not otherwise do,” 30.

  11. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 11. The best and certainly most amusing guide to organizational politics is F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1908).

  12. Helen Armstrong, “The Learning Organization: Changed Means to an Unchanged End,” Organization 7, no. 2 (2000): 355–361.

  13. John Coopey, “The Learning Organization, Power, Politics and Ideology,” Management Learning 26, no. 2 (1995): 193–214.

  14. David Knights and Glenn Morgan, “Corporate Strategy, Organizations, and Subjectivity: A Critique,” Organization Studies 12, no. 2 (1991): 251.

  15. Stewart Clegg, Chris Carter, and Martin Kornberger, “Get Up, I
Feel Like Being a Strategy Machine,” European Management Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 21–28.

  16. Stephen Cummings and David Wilson, eds., Images of Strategy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 3. Their proposal: “A good strategy, whether explicit or implicit, is one that both orients a company and animates it,” 2.

  17. Peter Franklin, “Thinking of Strategy in a Postmodern Way: Towards an Agreed Paradigm,” Parts 1 and 2, Strategic Change 7 (September–October 1998), 313–332 and (December 1998), 437–448.

  18. Donald Hambrick and James Frederickson, “Are You Sure You Have a Strategy?” Academy of Management Executive 15, no. 4 (November 2001): 49.

  19. John Kay, The Hare & The Tortoise: An Informal Guide to Business Strategy (London: The Erasmus Press, 2006), 31.

  20. “Instant Coffee as Management Theory,” Economist 25 (January 1997): 57.

  21. Eric Abrahamson, “Management Fashion,” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 1 (1996): 254–285.

  22. Jane Whitney Gibson and Dana V. Tesone, “Management Fads: Emergence, Evolution, and Implications for Managers,” The Academy of Management Executive 15, no. 4 (2001): 122–133.

  23. Dilbert had an example: After the executive was told that he could gauge his success by the number of repeat customers, he proudly reported that “virtually every customer gets another unit within three months of buying the first one!” When asked what happened if he did not “count warranty replacements,” he replied, “Ooh then we don’t look so good.” Adams, The Dilbert Principle, 158.

  24. R. S. Kaplan and D. P. Norton, “The Balanced Scorecard: Measures that Drive Performance,” Harvard Business Review 70 (Jan–Feb 1992): 71–79, and “Putting the Balanced Scorecard to Work,” Harvard Business Review 71 (Sep–Oct 1993): 134–147. Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2011), 207–214.

  25. Paula Phillips Carson, Patricia A. Lanier, Kerry David Carson, and Brandi N. Guidry, “Clearing a Path Through the Management Fashion Jungle: Some Preliminary Trailblazing,” The Academy of Management Journal 43, no. 6 (December 2000): 1143–1158.

  26. Barry M. Staw and Lisa D. Epstein, “What Bandwagons Bring: Effects of Popular Management Techniques on Corporate Performance, Reputation, and CEO Pay,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 2000): 523–556.

  27. Keith Grint, “Reengineering History,” 193 (see chap. 33, n. 20).

  28. Guillermo Armando Ronda-Pupo and Luis Angel Guerras-Martin, “Dynamics of the Evolution of the Strategy Concept 1992–2008: A Co-Word Analysis,” Strategic Management Journal 33 (2011): 162–188. Their consensus definition: “the dynamics of the firm’s relations with its environment for which the necessary actions are taken to achieve its goals and/or to increase performance by means of the rational use of resources.” This has yet to catch on.

  29. Damon Golskorkhi, Linda Rouleau, David Seidl, and Erro Vaara, eds., “Introduction: What Is Strategy as Practice?” Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13.

  30. Paula Jarzabkowski, Julia Balogun, and David See, “Strategizing: The Challenge of a Practice Perspective,” Human Relations 60, no. 5 (2007): 5–27. To be fair, the word had been around since at least the 1970s.

  31. Richard Whittington, “Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research,” Organization Studies 27, no. 5 (May 2006): 613–634. (Note the attractions of alliteration.)

  32. Ian I. Mitroff and Ralph H. Kilmann, “Stories Managers Tell: A New Tool for Organizational Problem Solving,” Management Review 64, no. 7 (July 1975): 18–28; Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromiley, “Strategic Stories: How 3M Is Rewriting Business Planning,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1998), 41–48.

  33. Jay A. Conger, “The Necessary Art of Persuasion,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1998), 85–95.

  34. Lucy Kellaway, Sense and Nonsense in the Office (London: Financial Times: Prentice Hall, 2000), 19.

  35. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 129.

  36. Valérie-Inès de la Ville and Elèonore Mounand, “A Narrative Approach to Strategy as Practice: Strategy Making from Texts and Narratives,” in Golskorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl, and Vaara, eds., Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice, 13.

  37. David M. Boje, “Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney as ‘Tamara-Land,’ ” Academy of Management Journal 38, no. 4 (August 1995): 997–1035.

  38. Karl E. Weick, Making Sense of the Organization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 344–345. It appears in a number of versions in his work, starting in 1982.

  39. Mintzberg et al., Strategy Safari, 160 (see chap. 30, n. 29).

  40. This led to accusations of plagiarism. Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham, “Substitutes for Strategy Research: Notes on the Source of Karl Weick’s Anecdote of the Young Lieutenant and the Map of the Pyrenees,” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 6, no. 2 (2006): 194–204.

  41. Richard T. Pascale, “Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Story Behind Honda’s Success,” California Management Review 26 (1984): 47–72. The California Management Review 38, no. 4 (1996) had a roundtable to discuss the implications of this story which included Michael Goold (author of the original BCG report), “Learning, Planning, and Strategy: Extra Time”; Richard T. Pascale, “Reflections on Honda”; Richard P. Rumelt, “The Many Faces of Honda”; and Henry Mintzberg, “Introduction” and “Reply to Michael Goold.” Pascale was challenging a report by the Boston Consulting Group commissioned by the British Government to explain the precipitate decline of the British motorcycle industry from a commanding market position. BCG blamed “a concern for short term profitability” in Britain while reporting on how the Japanese had managed to develop a massive internal market for small motorcycles. This meant that costs were low, so when they decided to export there was no way that British firms geared to large motorcycles could compete. Honda achieved stunning economies of scale: producing about two hundred motorcycles per worker per year compared with fourteen motorcycles in British factories. Boston Consulting Group, Strategy Alternatives for the British Motorcycle Industry, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975).

  42. Henry Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 1987), 70.

  43. Andrew Mair, “Learning from Japan: Interpretations of Honda Motors by Strategic Management Theorists,” Nissan Occasional Paper Series No. 29, 1999, available at http://www.nissan.ox.ac.uk/_data/assets/pdf_file/0013/11812/NOPS29.pdf. A shorter version appears in Andrew Mair, “Learning from Honda,” Journal of Management Studies 36, no. 1 (January 1999): 25–44.

  44. Jeffrey Alexander, Japan’s Motorcycle Wars: An Industry History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).

  45. Mair, “Learning from Japan,” 29–30. The debate is reviewed in Christopher D. McKenna, “Mementos: Looking Backwards at the Honda Motorcycle Case, 2003–1973,” in Sally Clarke, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Steven Usselman, eds., The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Lessons from Twentieth Century American Business (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008).

  46. Phil Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect (New York: The Free Press, 2007).

  47. John Kay, The Hare & The Tortoise, 33, 70, 158, 160.

  48. Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gap Between Plans, Actions and Results (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2011).

  49. A. G. Laffley and Roger Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 272), 214–215.

  50. Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (London: Profile Books, 2011), 77, 106, 111.

  51. Ibid., 32. “Fluff” involved superficial restatements of the obvious, raised to a higher level by neologisms, or abstruse concepts which could give an appearance of profundity. It was reflected in a tendency to string abstract nouns together, each with a positive connotation. Rumelt blamed the ac
ademic world, where the manipulation of abstractions was often a way of making authors appear cleverer than they are, and could require constant translation with real examples to give meaning to the ideas.

  52. Ibid., 58.

  36 The Limits of Rational Choice

  1. Cited in Paul Hirsch, Stuart Michaels, and Ray Friedman, “‘Dirty Hands’ versus ‘Clean Models’: Is Sociology in Danger of Being Seduced by Economics,” Theory and Society 16 (1987): 325.

  2. Emily Hauptmann, “The Ford Foundation and the Rise of Behavioralism in Political Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 48, no. 2 (2012): 154–173.