Emergent Corporate Strategy
Emergent corporate strategy
CORPORATE STRATEGY is the direction an organization takes with the objective of achieving business success in the long term. Recent approaches have focused on the need for companies to adapt to and anticipate changes in the business environment. The development of a corporate strategy involves establishing the purpose and scope of the organization's activities and the nature of the business it is in, taking the environment in which it operates, its position in the marketplace, and the competition it faces into consideration. Strategic management is a relatively young subject. It has its roots in the economic and social theories of the 1930s and 1940s - perhaps even earlier. It only really began to emerge as a separate topic in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today, there is only partial agreement on the fundamental principles of strategic management with many views, ideas and concepts. Among the numerous early contributors, the most influential were Alfred Chandler, Philip Selznick, Igor Ansoff and Peter Drucker. Alfred Chandler recognized the importance of coordinating management activity under an all-encompassing strategy. Interactions between functions were typically handled by managers who relayed information back and forth between departments. Chandler stressed the importance of taking a long term perspective when looking to the future. In his 1962 ground breaking 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.”
Times change and concepts evolve so by the 1980s one can choose between two pathways when developing a strategy for a corporation, non-profit organization or an institution: the prescriptive and the emergent approach. Deliberate strategy is goal-orientated. It asks: what do we want to achieve? Emergent strategy is means-orientated. It asks: what is possible, with the means we
CORPORATE STRATEGY is the direction an organization takes with the objective of achieving business success in the long term. Recent approaches have focused on the need for companies to adapt to and anticipate changes in the business environment. The development of a corporate strategy involves establishing the purpose and scope of the organization's activities and the nature of the business it is in, taking the environment in which it operates, its position in the marketplace, and the competition it faces into consideration. Strategic management is a relatively young subject. It has its roots in the economic and social theories of the 1930s and 1940s - perhaps even earlier. It only really began to emerge as a separate topic in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today, there is only partial agreement on the fundamental principles of strategic management with many views, ideas and concepts. Among the numerous early contributors, the most influential were Alfred Chandler, Philip Selznick, Igor Ansoff and Peter Drucker. Alfred Chandler recognized the importance of coordinating management activity under an all-encompassing strategy. Interactions between functions were typically handled by managers who relayed information back and forth between departments. Chandler stressed the importance of taking a long term perspective when looking to the future. In his 1962 ground breaking 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.”
Times change and concepts evolve so by the 1980s one can choose between two pathways when developing a strategy for a corporation, non-profit organization or an institution: the prescriptive and the emergent approach. Deliberate strategy is goal-orientated. It asks: what do we want to achieve? Emergent strategy is means-orientated. It asks: what is possible, with the means we