Towards An Organic perspective on strateg. The Mechanistic perspective, страница 19

The integration of organization and environment into each of the subprocesses suggests a view of strategic management as a process of managing change (or persistence). It thus highlights human engagement, the particular role of strategic leaders, and the particular considerations associated with change such as lags, timing, duration, momentum, inertia, and abortive efforts. It suggests that strategy formulation broadly deals with the sensing, evaluating, and planning of external and internal change rather than more narrowly with making choices. Strategy realization then deals with the realization of change, planned or emergent. Finally, the role of recurrent strategic management is to facilitate the emergence, planning, and realization of change, as well as to evaluate and integrate these facets of managing change.

Second, the idea that strategy affects its own inputs (i.e., organization and environment) may suggest that the process and effects of strategy realization need to be recognized at formulation: strategy needs to be planned with its effects in mind. Particularly, during strategy execution, additional changes may take place, and strategy itself may affect these changes in part. Since the firm’s actions change the nature of the problem it faces, the firm needs to select a realizable strategy —one that will provide a good dynamic match between organizational and environmental attributes if and when it is implemented and sustained.

An example from a familiar context may illustrate this point. When the traditional choice model is applied, a firm considering entry into a new industry needs to evaluate the structure of that industry vis-a`-vis the firm’s available resources. We propose to consider how industry structure and firm resources might look if and when entry occurs and is completed: what changes will occur before and during formulation or execution (e.g., the simultaneous entry of other firms), what changes will be produced by the entry (e.g., migration of customers), what resources will be consumed during the process (e.g., managerial attention), what implementation capability the firm has (e.g., how efficient the entry process is likely to be), and how internal and external stakeholders might support or interfere with execution (e.g., reaction of incumbents, and employee support).

Moreover, the potentially path-dependent nature of strategy suggests that the evaluation of alternative strategies needs to consider their impact on subsequent strategies, for example, the ease of transition from one alternative to a fall-back alternative. Beyond the question of how current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) affect the choice of a current strategy, an equally important consideration might be the extent to which an executed strategy improves the future SWOT of the firm. The view of strategy as creating and affecting its own inputs also suggests the need for backward and interactive reasoning, which is not an integral part of the SWOT model (Hill and Westbrook, 1997).^[15]

A third implication of the organic model suggests that strategy formulation, the main focus of strategy research and teaching, may have a less significant role in the overall strategic management process and in affecting performance outcomes than traditionally conceived. This can be appreciated through the use of backward reasoning. As Figure 2 indicates, what may eventually affect a firm’s performance is its realized strategy. Therefore, a main managerial question becomes how to generate the most effective realized strategies. This comes down to either implementing a previously formulated strategy, or realizing an emergent strategy. Furthermore, both planned (and subsequently implemented) and emergent strategies are supported by more basic and recurrent strategic management activities. Consequently, the firm may need to either plan well or create the organization necessary to implement effectively, or respond effectively, through emergent strategies. Thus, given the potential effects of implementation, emergent strategies, and strategic management’s basic functions, the traditional attention given to choice and formulation may be disproportionate.