Change may seem continuous but it occurs in the context of that orientation and usually amounts to doing more of the same, perhaps better as well. Most organizations favor these periods of stability because they achieve success not by changing strategies but by exploiting the ones they have. Companies in the business of producing novel outputs apparently need to fly off in all directions from time to time to sustain their creativity. Yet they also need to settle down after such periods to find some order in the resulting chaos.
To manage strategy is to craft thought and action control and learning stability and change. The popular view sees the strategist as a planner or as a visionary, someone sitting on a pedestal dictating brilliant strategies for everyone else to implement. While recognizing the importance of thinking ahead, and especially of the need for creative vision in this pedantic world. Strategic planning must be recognized for what it is: a means, not to create strategy, but to program a strategy already created to work out its implications formally.
It is essentially analytic in nature, based on decomposition, while strategy creation is essentially a process of synthesis. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd? Crafting Strategy. Uploaded by Proggo Choudhury. Document Information click to expand document information Description: paragraph.
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It is encouraged to seek continuous improvement. Yet they also need to settle down after such periods to find some order in the resulting chaos. Then the advent of television brought back a very sharp focus in the early s, as noted earlier. But in the late s, this dissipated almost as quickly as it began, giving rise to another creative period of exploration.
Then the social changes in the early s evoked a new period of convergence around experimental films and social issues.
More recently, a focus on ceramic murals seems to be emerging. Whether through quantum revolutions or cycles of convergence and divergence, however, organizations seem to need to separate in time the basic forces for change and stability, reconciling them by attending to each in turn. Many strategic failures can be attributed either to mixing the two or to an obsession with one of these forces at the expense of the other.
The problems are evident in the work of many craftsmen. On the one hand, there are those who seize on the perfection of a single theme and never change. Eventually the creativity disappears from their work and the world passes them by—much as it did Volkswagenwerk until the company was shocked into its strategic revolution.
And then there are those who are always changing, who flit from one idea to another and never settle down. Because no theme or strategy ever emerges in their work, they cannot exploit or even develop any distinctive competence. And because their work lacks definition, identity crises are likely to develop, with neither the craftsmen nor their clientele knowing what to make of it. The popular view sees the strategist as a planner or as a visionary, someone sitting on a pedestal dictating brilliant strategies for everyone else to implement.
While recognizing the importance of thinking ahead and especially of the need for creative vision in this pedantic world, I wish to propose an additional view of the strategist—as a pattern recognizer, a learner if you will—who manages a process in which strategies and visions can emerge as well as be deliberately conceived.
This strategist finds strategies no less than creates them, often in patterns that form inadvertently in its own behavior. What, then, does it mean to craft strategy? Let us return to the words associated with craft: dedication, experience, involvement with the material, the personal touch, mastery of detail, a sense of harmony and integration.
Managers who craft strategy do not spend much time in executive suites reading MIS reports or industry analyses. They are involved, responsive to their materials, learning about their organizations and industries through personal touch.
They are also sensitive to experience, recognizing that while individual vision may be important, other factors must help determine strategy as well. Managing strategy is mostly managing stability, not change. Indeed, most of the time senior managers should not be formulating strategy at all; they should be getting on with making their organizations as effective as possible in pursuing the strategies they already have.
Like distinguished craftsmen, organizations become distinguished because they master the details. To manage strategy, then, at least in the first instance, is not so much to promote change as to know when to do so. Advocates of strategic planning often urge managers to plan for perpetual instability in the environment for example, by rolling over five-year plans annually.
But this obsession with change is dysfunctional. Organizations that reassess their strategies continuously are like individuals who reassess their jobs or their marriages continuously—in both cases, people will drive themselves crazy or else reduce themselves to inaction. The formal planning process repeats itself so often and so mechanically that it desensitizes the organization to real change, programs it more and more deeply into set patterns, and thereby encourages it to make only minor adaptations.
So-called strategic planning must be recognized for what it is: a means, not to create strategy, but to program a strategy already created—to work out its implications formally. It is essentially analytic in nature, based on decomposition, while strategy creation is essentially a process of synthesis. That is why trying to create strategies through formal planning most often leads to extrapolating existing ones or copying those of competitors. This is not to say that planners have no role to play in strategy formation.
In addition to programming strategies created by other means, they can feed ad hoc analyses into the strategy-making process at the front end to be sure that the hard data are taken into consideration.
They can also stimulate others to think strategically. And of course people called planners can be strategists too, so long as they are creative thinkers who are in touch with what is relevant.
But that has nothing to do with the technology of formal planning. Environments do not change on any regular or orderly basis. Go tell people who lived through the Great Depression or survivors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II that ours are turbulent times. Much of the time, change is minor and even temporary and requires no strategic response. Once in a while there is a truly significant discontinuity or, even less often, a gestalt shift in the environment, where everything important seems to change at once.
But these events, while critical, are also easy to recognize. The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting the subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that, there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation. Such discontinuities are unexpected and irregular, essentially unprecedented.
They can be dealt with only by minds that are attuned to existing patterns yet able to perceive important breaks in them. Unfortunately, this form of strategic thinking tends to atrophy during the long periods of stability that most organizations experience just as it did at Volkswagenwerk during the s and s.
So the trick is to manage within a given strategic orientation most of the time yet be able to pick out the occasional discontinuity that really matters. The Steinberg chain was built and run for more than half a century by a man named Sam Steinberg. For 20 years, the company concentrated on perfecting a self-service retailing formula introduced in Then in , with the arrival of the first shopping center in Montreal, Steinberg realized he had to redefine his business almost overnight.
He knew he needed to control those shopping centers and that control would require public financing and other major changes. So he reoriented his business. The ability to make that kind of switch in thinking is the essence of strategic management. And it has more to do with vision and involvement than it does with analytic technique.
Sam Steinberg was the epitome of the entrepreneur, a man intimately involved with all the details of his business, who spent Saturday mornings visiting his stores. Everything has to do with your knowledge. I knew merchandise, I knew cost, I knew selling, I knew customers.
I knew everything, and I passed on all my knowledge; I kept teaching my people. Facts are available to anyone; this kind of knowledge is not. Wisdom is the word that captures it best. But wisdom is a word that has been lost in the bureaucracies we have built for ourselves, systems designed to distance leaders from operating details. Craftsmen have to train themselves to see, to pick up things other people miss.
The same holds true for managers of strategy. It is those with a kind of peripheral vision who are best able to detect and take advantage of events as they unfold. Whether in an executive suite in Manhattan or a pottery studio in Montreal, a key to managing strategy is the ability to detect emerging patterns and help them take shape.
The job of the manager is not just to preconceive specific strategies but also to recognize their emergence elsewhere in the organization and intervene when appropriate. Like weeds that appear unexpectedly in a garden, some emergent strategies may need to be uprooted immediately. Thus some patterns are worth watching until their effects have more clearly manifested themselves.
Then those that prove useful can be made deliberate and be incorporated into the formal strategy, even if that means shifting the strategic umbrella to cover them.
To manage in this context, then, is to create the climate within which a wide variety of strategies can grow. In more complex organizations, this may mean building flexible structures, hiring creative people, defining broad umbrella strategies, and watching for the patterns that emerge.
Finally, managers considering radical departures need to keep the quantum theory of change in mind. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time to sow and a time to reap. Some new patterns must be held in check until the organization is ready for a strategic revolution, or at least a period of divergence.
Managers who are obsessed with either change or stability are bound eventually to harm their organizations. As pattern recognizer, the manager has to be able to sense when to exploit an established crop of strategies and when to encourage new strains to displace the old.
While strategy is a word that is usually associated with the future, its link to the past is no less central. About Us CoachingOurselves is peer-coaching for leadership development and organizational change. Download Module. Contact Us. First Name. Download Whitepaper. Enter your name and email to get instant access to our Fujitsu White Paper.
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