Strategic Management Journal. Antecedents of temporary advantage, страница 3

There are also a number of important issues related to how firms transition from one advantage to the next. For example, how do firms manage the timing and transitions from one advantage to another as they learn? When should they begin these transitions? Should they plan for the next advantage prior to the erosion of an existing advantage? How can firms avoid cannibalization of an existing advantage while creating a new advantage? Is there path dependence across a firm's sequence of advantages or are the sequences truly unpredictable and responsive to unpredictable change? In sum, strategy in today's environment is analogous to a marksman who is shooting at a moving and very unpredictable target (Thompson, 1967). Skill and capabilities are needed, but instincts are necessary too, and the shooter's strategy must be fine-tuned unremittingly to adjust to the moving target.

Finally, as environments get more dynamic, they become more unpredictable and uncertain, making the creation of intended, planned strategies more difficult. Strategic planning models were originally conceived for conditions of stability. In fast-changing environments where unexpected changes occur, strategic planning is inevitably fated to fail (Mintzberg, 1994). How do organizational structure, culture, and processes transform themselves so as to be capable of concatenating a series of short-lived advantages? More than engaging in old-fashioned formal planning, firms need to engage in a continual evaluation of their actions, developing a strategy as they go by seeing which actions bring about the best results (Grimm et al., 2005).

Others have gone so far as to suggest that finding sustainable advantages in unpredictable environments is more a matter of luck—requiring firms to be lucky as numerous unpredictable competence-destroying disruptions thwart their plans. The Austrian perspective has argued that success depends on variations across firms and sheer luck, as well as the distributions of entrepreneurial skills (Kirzner, 1979). So success may require just as much luck as strategy. And we have not determined if sustainable competitive advantage is merely the result of good luck (Barney, 1986; Cohen and Levinthal, 1994). How do companies develop strategies to actively manage luck? Is luck a valuable or even interesting concept in the study of temporary advantages? With disruptions coming not just from first moving innovators and competitors, but from terrorism, the fall of empires, global warming, fraud, and malfeasance, one might truly subscribe to the old German saying that ‘men plan and God laughs.’

Consequences of temporary advantage

1.Top of page

2.Abstract

3.Antecedents of temporary advantage

4.The management of temporary advantage

5.Consequences of temporary advantage

6.The field of strategic management without sustainable advantage

7.SUMMARY OF EXTANT WORK ON TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE

8.THIS SPECIAL ISSUE'S UNIQUE CONTRIBUTIONS TO TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE

9.THE FUTURE OF TEMPORARY VERSUS SUSTAINABLE ADVANTAGE: MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE OR SIMULTANEOUSLY COEXISTENT?

10.REFERENCES

So how do firms achieve high performance, evolve, and survive where advantages are fleeting? Do they intentionally cannibalize old advantages and transition to new ones? If so, when and under what conditions? Is there logic to the sequence and timing of moves deployed? How sustainable is the ability to create and concatenate a series of new advantages? How is organizational decision making and structure different in a world of temporary advantages? Does it create more shareholder value to milk one's advantage, experience a period of crisis, and then create a new advantage as compared to preplanning the self-cannibalization of one's advantages before others destroy them? And, how should managers manage time? As the pace of change and disruption accelerates, will other forces arise to create stability in markets? What economic, societal, and collaborative actions and strategies, if any, are emerging to dampen the escalation of strategic turmoil, rivalry, and fleeting advantage associated with hypercompetition, high-velocity, and other chaotic environments?