Critique Paper(Rev3)

7/28/2019 Critique Paper(Rev3)

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A CRITIQUE OF PRESCRIPTIVE VIEWS INSTRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Bangani Ngeleza

JUNE 2012


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. RATIONALE FOR SELECTING THE THEME..................................................1

2. IN SEARCH OF A NEW LENSES: - A REVIEW OF EFFORTS TO FIND ANEW PARADIGM................................................................................................2

3. THE CONCEPTUAL BASIS FOR THE CRITIQUE.......................................8

4. CRITIQUE OF REVIEWED ARTICLES.......................................................104.1 Principle 1: Strategy formation should be a controlled, conscious process of

thought .............................................................................................................104.2 Principle 2: Responsibility for control of strategy must rest with the chief

executive officer (or senior management) .......................................................20

4.3 Principle 3: The model of strategy formation must be kept simple.............24

4.4 Principle 4: Strategies should be unique: the best ones result from a process of

creative design .................................................................................................27

4.5 Principle 5: Strategies emerge from the design process fully formulated ...294.6 Principle 6: These strategies should be explicit and, if possible, articulated,

which also favours their being kept simple......................................................314.7 Principle 7: Only after unique, full blown, explicit, and simple strategies are

fully formulated can they then be implemented ..............................................32

5. INSIGHTS FROM THE REVIEW......................................................................37


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1. RATIONALEFORSELECTINGTHETHEME

The prescriptive school of strategic management treats strategy formulation

as a process of conceptual design, formal planning and analytical positioning

(Mintzberg, 1990). This school of thought has been cited as having made

significant contributions to the theory and practice of strategic management

over a number of decades. This notwithstanding, a number of authors have

started to query the dominance of prescription in strategic management and

have called for a paradigm shift towards more descriptive and organic

perspective that account for complexities that organisations have to contend

with.

Amongst those authors who perceive a need for a shift towards an organic

perspective, is Farjoun (2001). This author states that prompted by the

limitations of the mechanistic (prescriptive) perspective, and inspired by the

advent of new ideas in the social and natural sciences, strategic

managements second broad progression saw the emergence and spread oforganic developments.

This search for a paradigm shift sees other authors favouring a more eclectic

approach that seeks to develop a model for strategic management that

accommodates all the major contributions to the field. This urge to break new

ground and engineer a paradigmatic shift is evident amongst many of the

articles that have been reviewed.

The motivation behind selecting to critique prescriptive views in reviewed

articles on strategic management is in order to demonstrate that attempts at

finding a new paradigm notwithstanding, prescriptive views still retain a strong

influence. Through this critique, the author hopes to show the significant gap

that still remains to be bridged in the search for a paradigmatic breakthrough

in strategic management. The paper demonstrates that strategic management

is still fraught with conventional wisdom presented as innovation. According to


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Ginter & White (2004), lessons learnt through the development of normative

and/or descriptive process models have yet to be integrated into a broad

theoretical framework.

The survival of prescriptive views in spite of evidence that a new way is

required for organisations to survive is attributed by Ackoff (2003) to the fact

that business managers tend to search for panaceas and simple solutions that

are prescribed by management gurus. According to this author, the

consequence of this is that 50% of the corporations in the Fortune 500 of 25

years ago no longer exist. This author further states that out of 23 new

corporations created in America each year, only one survives the first year.

Micklethwait & Woolridge (1996) cited in Miller & Vaughan (2001) state that

the proliferation of management theories and prescriptions is driven by two

basic human instincts-greed and fear.

This article is structured as follows: section 2 presents an overview of

reviewed articles attempts at finding a new strategic management paradigm.

This is followed in section 3 by a presentation of a conceptual basis that is

used to conduct the critique. In section 4, the reviewed articles are critiqued.

This paper ends with a presentation of insights in section 5.

2. INSEARCHOFANEWLENSE:AREVIEWOFEFFORTSTO

FINDANEWPARADIGM

A number of reviewed articles attempt a break with the prescriptive view to

strategic management by suggesting the development of models and/or

frameworks that seek to move beyond this view. Ansoff (1980) presents a

model for strategic issues management which represents a shift from strategic

management approaches that focus on periodic planning and response that

typifies the prescriptive school. Rather, in his article, this author suggests a

system which responds to signals in real time.


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In another paper, this author further extends his views by developing a model

that seeks to capture what he regards as the emerging paradigm of strategic

management (Ansoff, 1987). His model for a new paradigm borrows from a

number of disciplines including politics, sociology, psychology and cognitive

logic. The model also focuses on interactions between strategic and

operational behaviour, and seeks to integrate the activities of sensing,

deciding and executing in strategy making.

Other authors attempt to ameliorate some of the perceived failures of the

prescriptive approach, which have seen organisations failing in spite of well

devised plans. Amongst these are Goold & Quin (1990) who borrow from

agency theory to suggest improving the effectiveness of planning processes

through strategic control systems. In their paper, these authors acknowledge

the importance of balancing between rigidity and looseness. Their view

borrows from economics and is somewhat akin to the unifying views of the

organic school of strategic management, including complexity theories.

In their work, Caldert & Ricart (2003) seek an innovative approach to the field

of corporate strategy by drawing on the theoretical tradition of behavioural

evolutionism as enriched by complexity theory. They particularly focus on the

application of the work of Kauffman (1993) in the field of biology, to

organisation theory. These authors define a complex system as a system

(whole) comprising of numerous interacting entities (parts) each of which is

behaving in its local context according to some rule(s) or force(s). in

responding to their own particular contexts, these individual parts can, despite

acting in parallel without explicit interpart coordination or communication,

cause the system as a whole to display emergent patterns, orderly

phenomena and properties, at the global or collective level (Caldert & Ricard,

2003: 97)

Other authors that explore complexity theory to strategic management include

Grobman (2005). This author states that complexity theory is revolutionising

the way scientists look at the world, and has ontological implications as well.According to this author, complexity theory provides a framework for


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theorising about how there got to be an organisation and an environment in

the first place so that general systems theory could be applied. The author

cites Cohen (1999) as stating that complexity theory is attracting much

attention because of dramatic changes occurring in the structure and scope of

business, government and non-profit organisations. In an environment that

seems to be changing, organisations want to be more adaptable and better

able to learn from experience in order to reconfigure themselves in the face of

new demands

Grobman (2005) regards the dominant paradigm for strategic management

that is driven by general systems theory as being reductionist in its suggesting

that a system can be analysed by understanding each of its parts, and that

there was a general linear relationship between inputs and outputs. The

author cites Anderson (1999) as stating that complex systems on the other

hand demonstrate nonlinearity because each component interacts with others

via a web of feedback loops

A composite approach that differs from general systems theory is adopted by

Spanos & Lioukas (2001). In their study, they seek to unify the industry

organisation viewpoint of strategy on the one hand and the resource based

view on the other. Their study is an attempt at building a theory and model

based on a composite approach between strategy, industry and firm asset

effects. They found that both firm specific and industry effects are important in

explaining firm performance, operationalised as market share and profitability.

Synthetic thinking is also propounded by Ackoff (2003). In an interview with

the Strategy and Leadership Journal, this author identified one of the

characteristics of a new paradigm for strategic management as synthetic

thinking. According to this author, synthetic thinking provides a better

understanding of complex systems than analytical thinking does. Synthetic

thinking is a way of thinking about and designing a system that derives the

properties and behaviour of its parts from the functions required of the whole.

The whole has properties that none of its parts have (Allio, 2003: 21).


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Ginter & White (1982) contribute to the building of a new strategic

management theory through developing a theory of learning that

acknowledges the reciprocal influence of the environment on the one hand

and organisational behaviour on the other. This represents an early attempt at

recognising the role of complexity in strategic management. The Social

Learning Theory of Strategic Management theory (SLTSM) introduces an

organic understanding and extends the general systems thinking, by including

feedback loops to the conduct of strategy.

The purpose of Ginter & Whites paper is to present a theory that will permit

existing strategy concepts to be synthesised in an integrated framework. It is

an attempt at integrating a variety of theoretical schemas, including systems

theory, contingency theory, operational and managerial role definitions. These

authors state that these schema have provided limited, if-then prescriptive

models for strategic management. The SLTSM is premised on the view that

behaviour results from the interaction of persons and situations, rather than

from either factor alone. They cite Davis and Luthans who state that social

learning posits that the person and the environment do not function as

independent units but instead determine each other in a reciprocal manner.

Rumelt, Schendel & Teece (1991) contribute to the search for new

frameworks by drawing on economic thinking to explain enduring company

success. Their effort at presenting a synthesis between strategic management

and economic thinking results in an adoption of a resource based view and its

focus on factor market influences on firm performance. In addition to invoking

agency theory, these authors consider the contributions of other economic

influences on strategic management including game theory, transaction cost

economics and evolutionary economics.

Other authors that use the resource-based view to develop a unifying

research programme are Mahoney & Pandian (1992). Their integrated

research programme draws from economics, diversification strategy

explanations and industrial organisation. Their economics perspective drawsfrom agency theory, property rights, transaction costs, evolutionary economics


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and game theory. In this article, these authors introduce an evolutionary

viewpoint to strategic management and define strategy formulation as

consisting of the constant search for ways in which the firms unique

resources can be redeployed in changing circumstances.

Prahalad & Hamel (1994) emphasise the need for learning and for managers

to change their dominant logic if firms are to survive the radical environmental

changes that characterise the current business environment. In their push for

the re-examination of traditional strategy paradigm, they emphasise the need

for managers to be able to anticipate the future, in a vain similar to that of

Clancy (1990). In order to assist managers, these authors present checklists

that present environmental factors that need to be anticipated. They point out

that old ways of doing strategy no longer work and that there is a need for

new lenses, including the use of game theory, chaos theory, war and

diplomacy.

The role of chaos theories in strategy processes is acknowledged by Hamel

(1998), who states that writings on the process of strategy making have

tended to focus on the content of strategy and have overlooked the conduct of

strategy. Industry structure analysis is one example of this limited focus.

In addressing the over emphasis of strategic thought, primarily prescriptive

views, on the content of strategy, Venkatraman & Cannilus (1984) present

evidence of recent studies that have integrated the content and the process

conceptualisation of the concept of fit in strategy. They demonstrate that it is

possible to apply the concept of fit by looking at it from both an inter-

organisational (external) and strategic choice (internal) perspectives. They

also seek to move the application of the concept of fit beyond the traditional

bi-variate interactions (strategy and culture, strategy and management style,

strategy and structure etc) towards an understanding of fit as characterised by

a larger array of elements. To this end, these authors apply the Mckinsey 7s

model to show organisational congruence.


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Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst, Pritchard, & Barber (2004) develop a

comprehensive model for defining a corporate strategy, constructing a

strategy document and strategy implementation by applying a combination of

methodologies and tools. This model seeks to make a break with the

predominant focus on strategy content.

In the same vain, Caldert & Ricart (2003), developed a dynamic framework of

corporate strategy based on three interlinked sets of processes, viz. senior

management cognition, which they refer to as framing the fitness landscape,

corporate search strategy or strategic behaviour and architectural design.

Farjoun (2001) also develops an organic model1 which takes account of the

complex interactions and self influences amongst key strategic management

constructs of firm organisation, firm environment, firm strategy and firm

performance. This presents a holistic view of strategy that replaces the

conventional distinction between content and process.

The concept of strategy emergence, which represents another significant

break with prescriptive views, is propounded by Nichols (2000). This view

acknowledges that strategy evolves over time as intentions accommodate

reality. This author acknowledges the definition of strategy as plan, pattern,

position and perspective. The same views on strategy are expressed by

Mintzberg (1987) who holds the view that multiple definitions can help

practitioners and researchers alike to manoeuvre through the field of strategic

management. Farjouns O-E-S-P model also extends the concept of strategy

by recognising the existence of emergent strategies which may not be a result

of deliberate planning.

Attempts at breaking with the past are also evident in writings by authors from

other management disciplines. Writing from a marketing perspective, Clancy

(1990) makes a forecast of ten developments which will separate winners

from losers in advertising in 2020. Amongst these is the importance for the

1The O-E-S-P model, conceptualizes of the interaction between the constructs as evolving or random

and best captured by the notion of continuous co-alignment


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marketer to anticipate competitive defences and then develop and test

offensive strategies designed to overwhelm the competitor, more along the

lines of game theory.

3. THECONCEPTUALBASISFORTHECRITIQUE

Mintzbergs (1990) discussion of the design school serves as the bases for

analysing the articles. As already stated, the critique seeks to demonstrate

that in spite of attempts by a number of writers to develop new approaches

and/or paradigms for strategic management the prescriptive perspective still

wields a lot of influence, even amongst some of those authors that purport to

seek new paradigms.

Mintzberg (1990) identifies ten schools of thought in strategic management.

Three of these he identifies as prescriptive in orientation. These treat strategy

formation as a process of conceptual design, of formal planning and of

analytical positioning, with the latter including research on the content of

competitive strategies. Six other schools are identified by this author asdealing with the strategy process in a descriptive way. These include the

entrepreneurial school, the cognitive school, the learning school, the

environmental school and the configurational school.

Although his article is addressed to the design school, this schools basic

framework underlies almost all prescription in this field and, accordingly, has

enormous impact on how strategy and the strategy making process areconceived in practice as well as in education and research, (Mintzberg, 1990:

171).

The following basic prescriptive principles are discussed by Mintzberg (1990)

and are used as a basis for demonstrating the level of inertia in strategy

research, writing and practice as reflected in the articles reviewed in the next

section of this paper. The principles are:


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1. Strategy formation should be a controlled, conscious process of

thought, i.e. action follows once strategies have been fully formulated

and strategy is associated with intentionality and deliberateness.

2. Responsibility for that control and consciousness must rest with the

chief executive officer. That person is THE strategist, i.e. to this school,

ultimately there is only one strategist, and that is the manager who sits

at the apex of the organisational hierarchy. Mintzberg (1990) cites

Heye (1985) who states that this is a command and control mentality

that allocates all major decisions to top management, which imposes

them on the organisation and monitors them through elaborate

planning, budgeting and control systems. This also relegates

environment to a minor role of input to strategy formation but not an

intrinsic part of the process, to be accounted for and then navigated

through but not interacted with (Mintzberg, 1990)

3. The model of strategy formation must be kept simple: The idea that

one way to ensure that strategy can be controlled in one mind is to

keep the process simple.

4. Strategies should be unique; the best ones result from a process of

creative design: This means that it is the specific situation that matters.

Strategies have to be tailored to the individual case (Mintzberg, 1990).

He further cites Andrews (1965) that in each company the way in which

distinctive competence, organisational resources, and organisational

values are combined is or should be unique.

5. Strategies emerge from the design process fully formulated: there is no

room offered to incrementalist (evolutionary) views or emergent

strategies. There is a view for instance that strategy as perspective

appears at a point in time, fully formulated, ready to be implemented.

This relates to the view that the process reduces to choice. The

implication is that the strategist is able to line up alternative strategiesto be evaluated so that one can be definitively chosen.


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6. These strategies should be explicit and, if possible, articulated, which

also favours their being kept simple: This view holds that strategies

should be explicit to those who make them and that they should be

articulated so that others in the organisation can understand them. The

strategy must be specific enough to require some action and exclude

others. This means that strategies have to be kept rather simple in

order to facilitate this articulation.

7. Only after unique, full-blown, explicit, and simple strategies are fully

formulated can they then be implemented: This means that there is a

sharp distinction between the formulation of strategies on the one hand

and their implementation on the other. According to Mintzberg (1990),

this is consistent with classical notions or rationality diagnosis,

prescription, then action, representing the separation between thinking

and acting. The author further makes the point that the focus of this

school is on implementation not achievement, the assumption being

that given proper implementation, achievement is a foregone

conclusion. This according to Mintzberg (1990) is associated with the

premise that structure must follow strategy.

4. CRITIQUEOFREVIEWEDARTICLES

This section presents a critique of the reviewed articles using the seven

principles of Mintzberg (1990). The focus of the section is to demonstrate theextent to which many of the reviewed articles have been influenced by the

prescriptive views that are based on these seven principles.

4.1 Principle1:Strategyformationshouldbeacontrolled,conscious

processofthought

Many of the articles that have been reviewed adhere to the principle thatstrategy formation should be a controlled and conscious process, with little or


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no space for strategy emergence. The underlying viewpoint is that action

follows only once strategies have been fully formulated and that strategy is

associated with intentionality and deliberateness.

This view of deliberateness, driven as it is partly by the assumption that it is

possible to predict the future, is evident in Ansoff s (1990) assertion that one

of the factors that have made it desirable to separate what he refers to as

strategic issues analysis from annual strategic planning is that organisations

may not need the cumbersome paraphernalia of annual planning in cases

where the basic strategic thrusts are clear and relatively stable and whose

environment is stable.

The strategic issues management procedure developed by Ansoff assumes

that it is possible to accurately predict trends both inside and outside the

enterprise. This extends to the prediction of when exactly the time of impact of

an issue will occur so that organisations can time their responses to occur

before this time. The assumption is also that it is possible to know for sure

what the impact of the issues will be on the enterprise.

In his article, Clancy (1990) also uses information about the state of

advertising in 1990 to predict what advertising will be like in 2020. This author

discusses 10 developments which will radically transform advertising.

According to this author, the doors of Eldorardo, the golden city will be open

to firms that successfully managed these developments. This forecast was

based on the assumption that historical trends observable in 1990 will

continue unchanged.

Ansoffs presentation of the steps for Strategic Issues Management (SIM),

reflect strong rationality in another way. According to this author, steps for

conducting SIM include an analysis of environmental trends, internal trends

and performance trends, followed by an assessment of threats, opportunities,

strengths and weaknesses which then allow for the determination of the

impact and/or urgency of an issue. Extensive starting lists of the respectivetrends are also presented. This shows the weight that this author places on


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the role of rationality and conscious thought processes in strategic

management.

In his support of the Gresham Law of planning, which states that if left

uncontrolled, the operational activity suppresses the strategic activity, Ansoff

(1980) further betrays a preoccupation with the implementation of strategies

as relying on a conscious process of control.

In keeping with the view that strategy is a rational process of thought, Ansoffs

paradigm further links the scientific optics used by firms in conducting strategy

to environmental factors in a deterministic way, which in turn calls for the

rational analysis of the environment.

Strategic management as this conscious process of thought that is informed

by environmental determinism and rationality is also upheld by Goold & Quinn

(1990). These authors cite Simon (1987) as viewing the senior manager as

scanning the business situation and, from an assessment of all relevant

factors, arriving at a judgement of an appropriate response. This rationality

visualises a contemplative senior manager who is able to know what all the

relevant factors to consider in strategy making are. This person (the senior

manager) is also able to choose properly, from strategic choices that avail

themselves from their reflections. Through this rational contemplative

exercise, the scope of strategic management is reduced to individual

judgement.

Rumelt et al. (1991) also see firms as having choices to make if they are to

survive. According to these authors, those which are strategic include

selection of goals, the choice of products and services to offer, the design and

configuration of policies determining how the firm positions itself to compete in

product markets, the choice of an appropriate level of scope and diversity,

and the design of organisational structure, administrative systems and policies

used to define and coordinate work. Further, these authors see strategy as

not necessarily a single decision or primal action, but as a collection ofrelated, reinforcing, resource-allocation decisions and implementing actions.


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There can be no place for the role of chance and emergence in this design

process.

Rumelt et al. (1991) further explain the role of economics in strategic

management and continue to place emphasis on rational decision-making.

These authors present a rationality that is required by making use of a

sophisticated view of equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium is where each actor

does the best he or she can with what they individually know and control,

especially when coupled with uncertainty, asymmetric information and

unequal resource endowments, permitting a broad range of intriguing

outcomes or looked at another way, different picks on the competitive

landscape (Ghemawat, Collis, Pisano & Rivkin, 1999). The troublesome

nature of uncertainty is thus adequately dealt with by a sophisticated process

that sees independently acting actors making conscious choices based on

information in their possession. This game theoretic rationality and its

attendant assumptions that all players are rational is also evident in the

papers by Camere as well as Saloner, reviewed in Rumelt (1991).

Strategic management is concerned with co-ordination and resource

allocation inside the firm (Rumelt, et al.; 1991). This is opposed to the

industrial organisation view that posits the primacy of industry in determining

firm performance. Both these perspectives are influenced by economics, with

the former focussing on factor markets and the latter on product markets for

explanation. Both are rational standpoints for explaining strategic

management based on different deterministic perspectives.

The influence of economic rationality on the resource-based view that is

propounded by Mahoney & Pandian (1992) is clearly demonstrable in their

article. The article draws linkages between the Resource Based View and the

different branches of micro-economics including transaction cost, agency

theory, evolutionary economics and property rights. These authors also show

the complementary nature of RBV to the industrial organisation paradigm of

S-C-P, i.e. the Bain (1968) and Porter (1985) framework. They do this byshowing that the product market and the resource market are two sides of the


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same coin, i.e. to produce a particular product mix, you need a particular

resource mix and vice versa.

Strategy is a rational process of thought (Mahoney & Pandian, 1992). They

explain lasting profits as flowing from different sources of rents, i.e. owning a

valuable resource including land; monopoly rent including government

protection; entrepreneurial rent including Schumpeterian rent and firm specific

resources. A firm consciously selects its strategy to generate rents based

upon its resource capabilities. These authors cite Andrews (1971) as stating

that organisations with the strategic capability to focus and coordinate human

effort and the ability to evaluate effectively the resource position of the firm in

terms of strengths and weaknesses have a strong basis for competitive

advantage.

In referring to the contributions of Resource Based View (RBV) to a large

stream of research on diversification strategy, Mahoney & Pandian (1992)

further display their reliance on deterministic explanations. According to these

authors, this includes, that the resource based approach considers limitations

of diversified growth (i.e. growth through diversification is limited by resource

endowments). Secondly, the RBV considers important motivations for

diversification, i.e. when not all units perform at the same speed & capacity,

thus creating motivations for diversification to use extra capacity, particularly

Human Resources capacity. Thirdly it provides the theoretical perspective for

predicting the direction of diversification. Fourthly it provides a theoretical

rationale for predicting superior performance of certain categories of related

diversification, i.e. companies grow in the direction set by their capabilities

and these capabilities slowly expand and change.

A resource-based determinism also emerges in a statement that says if a

firm possesses valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and non-substitutable

economies of scale, learning curve economies, access to low-cost factors of

production, and technological resources, it seems clear that the firm should

pursue a cost leadership strategy (Barney, 2001: 53). This quote suggeststhat in the case of the cited combinations of factors, the choice is clear, and it


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is to pursue a low cost strategy. The overall tone in Barneys article is that a

firms strategy is determined by its resources, with no mention of reciprocal

influence, emergence or the role of chance.

Barney (2001) further applies the framework of Strategy-Structure-

Performance (S-S-P) to explain how firm resources can become of value. This

author acknowledges the important contributions of Structure-Conduct-

Performance (S-C-P) in that the firms resources value is determined by

industry structure as it is by firm strategy of S-S-P. The author further states

that in all high quality resource based work, researchers must begin by

addressing the value of resources with theoretical tools that specify the

market conditions under which different resources will and will not be

valuable.

Prahalad & Hamel (1994) on the other hand explain the changes in the

fortunes of some of the best-managed firms during the period 1984 to 1994 in

terms of what they refer to as the changing competitive milieu. All the forces

they refer to are external industry (environmental) factors, a view that support

the rational determinism of S-C-P form or the positioning school. The factors

they cite for instance are global competition, deregulation, structural changes,

excess capacity, mergers and acquisitions, environmental concerns, less

protectionism, changing customer expectations, technological discontinuities

and emergence of trading blocks. In a softening of the unidirectional

determinism that characterises environmental determinism, these authors

state that given all these changes, industry structure, increasingly, must be

seen as a valuable to be managed by firms and not accepted as a given.

In developing a dynamic force field model for strategic management, Paquin

& Koplyay (2007) use the design school to represent fundamental fit between

the firm and its environment. They achieve this using a two dimensional graph

that relates market potential with resource mobilisation. This view adopts an

equilibrium viewpoint in that there is an optimal regression line between the

two variables of market potential and resource mobilisation, with a multiplicityof possible peaks along this line. These authors state that the force field


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resulting from the interplay between an industrys critical success factors

should apply to any organisation operating in that same industry, which

suggests an industry organisation and Porters positioning rationality.

These authors further state that the strategic force field model may also be

useful in suggesting the adoption of various families of strategies. The choice

of an offensive, neutral or defensive strategy is accordingly, not done

arbitrarily but according to the strategic position an organisation occupies on

its strategic landscape.

This pre-occupation with rational choice in strategic management is also

reflected in Bourgeois (1984) who contends that top management or dominant

coalitions always retain a certain amount of discretion to choose courses of

action that serve to co-align the organisations resources with its

environmental opportunities, and to serve the values and preferences of

management. Muniv-Hernadez et al. (2004) agree, and cite MacDonald

(1996) who states that the purpose of strategic management is also to match

internal activities to environmental change, and match resources to those

activities. The process is thus characterised by rational choice and design.

In their article, Rumelt et al. (1991) also regret the loss of prescription in the

new economics that has come to influence strategy. These authors state that

the limitation of the new economics is that it explains rather than predicts.

They lambast micro-economics for delivering a large number of tightly

reasoned sub-models, but no strong guidance as to which will be important in

a particular situation. What they refer to as the collage problem in fact

betrays their discomfort with complexity and uncertainty. They further state

that it is up to strategy to bring in the application of microeconomic models,

i.e. strategic management should develop measures, tools and methods to

help specific situations.

Amongst the tools and methods to help specific situations are those

suggested by Goold & Campbell (1987) for strategic control. These authorspresent a typology of headquarters style to prescribe the types of controls that


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must be used by diversified firms, viz. financial controls for services

businesses and mature industries; strategic control for mature but complex

industries that require substantial investment and entrepreneurially oriented

strategic planning for industries that combine complexity and technological

advancement. Corporate strategies are thus a function of rational choice that

is deterministically imposed upon corporate level managers following a

process of contemplating industry factors.

Rational views have also permeated writings on change management. The

article by Adcroft, Willis & Hurst (2008) develops a rational model for

explaining organisational change. These authors state that the process is

logical and represents common sense as much as excellent or innovative

management. The model has three elements that are linearly represented,

viz. revolutionary event, revolutionary programme and revolutionary outcome.

The importance of change control measures is evidenced by the linearity of

this model, which suggests that for change to succeed, it must be managed to

conform to its linear prescriptions.

This view of change as a rational process that should be controlled is also

held by Offstein & Gnyawali (2006). These authors posit that the key

humanistic perspective to firm competitive behaviour is that firm actions are

controlled, dictated and influenced by strategic human actors that operate

within the boundaries of a firm. The assumption underlying this view is

representational and based on the view of a rational economic man who is

able to use knowledge to make rational choices (Jarzabowski & Wilson,

2006).

The rationalistic perspectives that have been presented in the foregoing

paragraphs ignore the writings and observations of a number of researchers

and authors that contradict the presumed validity and utility of unfettered

rational choice, control and determinism in strategic management.

For instance, Bakir & Bakir (2006) state that the very concept of purposefulstrategy has been seriously undermined by the recognition that unintended


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organisational strategies often emerge out of social interactions and

adaptations outside their boundaries. These authors contend that studies that

predate the current mainstream strategy literature demonstrate that strategy

processes, particularly in complex environments, are persistently non-rational,

resembling what has come to be known as muddling through and

organisational anarchy. This view is supported by Grobman (1995) who cites

Simon (1997) and Lindblom (1959) as pointing out the complexity of decision-

making in organisations, and the limitations of rational decision-making and

general management principles.

The folly of prediction is also demonstrated in an article by McKenna (1991).

In this article, the author relates a publicised lawsuit that Beecham, an

international consumer products company, filed against Yankelovich Clancy

Shulman, a US market research subsidiary of Saatchi & Saatchi. Yankelovich

forecast that Beechams product, Delicare, a cold water detergent, would win

between 45.4% and 52.3% of the US market if Beecham backed it with $18

million worth of advertising. The author state that according to Beecham,

Delicares highest market share was 25%. Its general market share was

between 15% and 20%. The author concludes that forecasts by their very

nature, must be unreliable, particularly with technology, competitors,

customers, and markets all shifting ground so often, so rapidly and so

radically.

Forecasting is based on assumptions that it is possible to predict the future

and that cause and effect relationships are simple and linear. It is also based

on the assumption that todays observations are a good basis for knowing

what will happen in the future. The reality of organisational life has on a

number of occasions been found to defy this logic, as the case of Beecham

shows.

In a manner that seem to contradict his focus on predicting the state of

advertising in 2020, Clancy (1990) also makes an example of a failed

advertising campaign for a new product which predicted market share of 3.6%following the campaign based on a $70 million budget and an assumption of


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competitive response in terms of advertising and promotion increasing by

80%. In this example, the real level of competitor response was 630%,

completely dwarfing the $70 million budget of this companys campaign and

effectively blowing this product out of the water. The best market share rating

that the product could achieve was 1%. It is interesting that, in spite of this

observation, Clancy still finds it prudent to make predictions about the future

of advertising.

In addressing issues of change, Burnes (2004) states that achieving effective

change in organisations requires simple order generating rules. According to

this author, this is because organisations are complex systems, which are

radically unpredictable and where even small changes can have massive and

unanticipated effects, top-down change cannot deliver the continuous

innovation which organisations need in order to survive and prosper.

The organic model for strategic management of Farjoun (2002) suggests that

strategy formulation broadly deals with the sensing, evaluating and planning

of external and internal change rather than more narrowly with making

choices. This author states that strategy realisation deals with the realisation

of change, planned or emergent. As already demonstrated, the role of

emergence is ignored by a number of writers on strategic management.

The pitfalls of emphasising rational choice in strategy are further

demonstrated by Hulbert & Pitt (1996). In their article, they write that the false

dichotomy that has been established between, differentiation and cost

leadership leads to a waste of resources. According to these authors, Taco

Bell, a US fast food chain, has successfully positioned itself against

hamburger giants such as Burger King and MacDonalds by offering an

alternative form of fast food in a different setting, while at the same time

lowering its cost structure in such a way that it is able to provide inexpensive

yet wholesome food. This exposes the limiting and the myopic nature of

choices presented by Porters generic strategies.


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In research notes and commentaries regarding the philosophy of strategy,

Powell (2002) critiques the assertion that it is possible to know with certainty

that some perceptible entity called a competitive advantage has a

demonstrable cause-effect relation with the performance of a unique firm. The

author states that one cannot use the language of know and certainty when

the relation is true by definition, the constructs are intangible and the

alternative hypothesis have not been seriously tested. The author states that

truths in strategy are neither certain nor final, and our wishing cannot make

them so, (Powell, 2002: 879).

4.2 Principle2:Responsibilityforcontrolofstrategymustrestwiththechiefexecutiveofficer(orseniormanagement)

According to this principle, ultimately there is only one strategist, (or at most a

small team) and that is the manager who sits at the apex of the organisational

hierarchy. Mintzberg (1990) cites Heye (1985) who states that this is a

command and control mentality that allocates all major decisions to top

management, which imposes them on the organisation and monitors them

through elaborate planning, budgeting and control systems. In this view, the

environment is also relegated to a minor role of input to strategy formation but

not an intrinsic part of the process. It is something to be accounted for and

then navigated through but not interacted with, (Mintzberg, 1990).

In his article, Ansoff (1980), allocates the responsibility for prioritising strategic

issues and for developing response strategies to general management, who

should also retain the responsibility for strategic control over such issues.

Strategic control of issues refers to continual re-evaluation of the significance

of issues and redefinition of both priorities and the direction of projects.

According to this view, all of this is the sole responsibility of the people sitting

at the top of the organisational hierarchy.

The preoccupation with the primacy of the role of senior management is

continued in Ansoff (1987) where the new paradigm for strategic management


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that the author presents places particular emphasis on the role of senior

management. The scientific optics that this author uses to describe various

forms of strategy making all relate to management behaviour, with no role

contemplated for lower levels of the hierarchy. In his top down view of

organisations, the author identifies factors in both the internal and external

environments that determine management strategic behaviour and serve as

the basis for management prescription.

Rumelt et al. (1991) also reserve the role of strategic management to senior

management, defining strategic management as including those subjects,

which are of primary concern to senior management. Prahalad & Bettis (1986)

in Mahoney & Pandian (1992) also see a rich connection among the firms

resources, distinctive competencies and the mental models or dominant logic

of the managerial team as driving diversification processes. Mahoney and

Pandian, (1992) state that the services and rents that resources will yield

depend upon the dominant logic of the top management team.

The centrality of the role of the Chief Executive or senior manager is also

reflected in the Social `Learning Theory of Strategic Management (SLTSM)

that is proffered by Ginter & White (1982). According to these authors, the

SLTSM posits that strategic behaviour is a result of an interaction of top

management cognitive processes and environmental influences. Strategic

behaviour in turn shapes the environment and conditions top management

future cognitions.

In their discussion of a humanistic perspective to firm competitive behaviour

Offstein & Gnyawali (2006) also limit their assessment of contributions of

human capital (individual knowledge and skills) and social capital (intra-

organisational relationships and knowledge growing from interactions of

individuals) to the CEO, the top management team and the Board of

Directors.

These articles confirm the assertion by Balogun (2007) that most research onstrategy and strategic change continues to focus more on upper echelons,


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with middle managers being regarded as linking pins or a conduit, connecting

senior managers with the rest of the organisation and relaying senior manager

orders in an unquestioning fashion. This betrays the influences of mechanistic

prescriptions on these authors.

Once strategies have been selected by the CEO or senior management, the

article by Goold & Quinn (1990), advices that the route to ensuring that

individuals at different levels (lower level managers and staff) are motivated to

implement them is through personal incentives and sanctions. According to

these authors, the responsibility for identifying deviations from agreed

objectives, pressing for new plans or changing responsible management in

cases of failure to implement strategy rests with senior management.

Effectively making strategic management a mechanistic design and control

process that relies on senior management.

This top down view of strategic management has invariably resulted in a

number of prescriptions regarding how the process should be controlled within

organisations. Lorange (1988) regards the setting of strategic and operational

budgets as a way of preventing managers lower down the hierarchy

sacrificing strategic considerations to achieve short-run performance targets.

The need for exercising caution with control is emphasised by Salter (1973) in

Goold & Quinn (1990). According to this author, annual bonuses usually

emphasize the short term, so a manager wants to look good at the end of the

year. To prevent his concentration on his own immediate rewards, top

management should evaluate the long-run implications of subordinates

actions and reward them at least in part on that basis.

The article by Goold & Quinn (1990) presents a list of prescriptions regarding

how to effectively set measurable goals that facilitate performance, and

incentivise, including that they should be specific, stretching, top-down and

allow for feedback, incentives and sanctions. Top down managerial

prescriptions extend to how to set strategic goals, including looking long-term,

competitively setting goals and incorporating financial and non-financial goals.


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These prescriptions regarding controls are extended by Ouchi (1979) in Goold

& Quinn (1990) in a contingency theory of control, where this author makes

the type of control to be selected contingent upon the ability to predict the

outcome on the one hand and on the ability to measure outputs precisely and

objectively on the other. Types of controls include clan control, results control,

and action control. Goold & Quinn (1990) also develop their own prescriptive

framework for choosing control systems contingent on environmental

turbulence and the ability to specify and measure precise strategic objectives.

The article by Sheehan (2006) argues that diagnostic controls (performance

metrics), boundary controls (measures used to control behaviour), belief

controls (measures to appeal to employees emotions) and interactive controls

(measures to keep track of changes in the competitive environment) are the

four levers needed to align what the firm desires to achieve (strategy) and

what is actually done by its employees.

In an apparent critique of this top down perspective of strategy, Ackoff (2003)

states that one of the problems with corporations is that they are hierarchies

rather than lower-archies, with authority flowing from the top rather than from

the bottom.

The view of top down strategic control overlooks the understanding of

strategic management as navigational translation (Bakir & Bakir, 2006).

According to this view, managers can see that strategy is a set of complex

processes impacted by a fluid and interlocking set of intervening conditions

that are beyond managerial control and that may change the dimensional

location of the properties of the strategy categories thus generating

unintended outcomes.

Shell is a good example of how strategy success can be impacted by lower

level staff. In writing about transformation efforts at this global company during

the 90s, Pascale (1999) observes that the process worked because senior

management realised that the people at the coalface (i.e. at countryoperations and at company owned service stations) know what is going on.


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They see the competitive threats and the companys inadequate response

every day. Once they are given the context, they can do a better job of

spotting opportunities and stepping up to decisions.

Further, in an opinion piece published in the Harvard Business Review

(undated), Mintzberg cites Hamels account about how Lou Gerstner added

$40 billion to IBMs shareholder value. According to the author, a programme

manager with an idea joined up with an open minded staff manager and

together they assembled a team that drove IBM into e-business. All that Lou

Gerstner did was support the initiative. Strategy thus emerged from the

bottom, a consideration that many of the articles that have been reviewed fail

to acknowledge.

4.3 Principle3:Themodelofstrategyformationmustbekeptsimple

The idea that one way to ensure that strategies can be controlled in one mind

is to keep the process simple is evident in some of the articles that have been

reviewed.

In his writing about the strategic issues management as a new system for

strategic management, Ansoff (1980) emphasises the need for simplicity.

Articles on strategic issues management have explored the strategic issue

problem and newly important phenomenon of weak signals. There is now a

need to translate these explorations into straightforward, practical how to do

it processes, (Ansoff, 1980: 150). The need for simplifications in fact forms

the essence of this article.

In simplifying the process of prioritising issues in strategic issues

management, Ansoff makes us of a matrix that presumably facilitates decision

making by ranking the urgency of issues in terms of low, significant and

pressing. Impact assessment is also simplified in terms of whether it is low,

significant or major.


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In a 1987 article, Ansoff proceeds to simplify his new paradigm by presenting

it in the form of a cube, with three dimensions, viz. the problem of strategy,

the process of strategy and the scientific optics. The author refers to the

paradigmatic cube as the minimal set of dimensions necessary to explain the

observable variants of strategic behaviour.

The meta-model that Ansoff (1987) presents identifies key forces which

determine the flow of interaction patterns, in a simplified unidirectional flow of

influence. The direction of influence between the environment and firm

behaviour, i.e. driving forces and perception of need is also unidirectional from

the environment to firm behaviour (structure-conduct-performance)

Bourgeois (1984) summarises the problems accurately when stating that one

of the characteristics of organisational literature is reductionism, the tendency

to focus on one independent variable (e.g. turbulent environment) as it causes

managers to manipulate one dependent variable (e.g. structure). This author

further states that in addition, the theories are generally derived from static

cross-sectional correlation studies, which present problems of causal

inference. According to this author these types of analysis assume that the

systems being studied are in equiibria.

This tendency to simplify is also queried in the article by Grobman (2005).

This author states that the dominant paradigm for decades was reductionist,

suggesting that a system can be analysed by understanding each of its parts,

and that there was a general linear relationship between inputs and outputs.

This author cites Anderson (1999) who states that complexity demonstrates

nonlinearity because each component interacts with others via a web of

feedback loops.

In an interview with the Strategy and Leadership journal, and in response to a

question regarding why it is easy for management gurus who purvey

platitudes, and simplifications2 to dupe managers, Ackoff (2003) states that it

2My emphasis


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is because most managers do not have the knowledge and understanding

required to deal with complexity, they attempt to reduce complex situations to

simple ones. Druckercited in Ackoff (2003), when responding to a question

about what he thought about the solutions suggested by Peters and

Waterman in their 1990 best selling book The Search for Excellence, said I

wish it were that simple. Meaning that problems do not have simple-minded

solutions.

Many of the reviewed articles also ignore the findings of Bakir & Bakir (2006)

that use grounded theory to study strategic management in organisations.

These authors found that in their understanding of translation in strategy,

managers were coping with fluidity and complexity. They quote the chair of

the Strategic Board of one of the companies they studied as stating that

nobody can see clear direction; nobody has an idea whats going to happen.

In their simplification of the strategy process, a number of the articles that

have been reviewed generally fit the description by Starns & Odom (2006)

who state that many approaches to knowledge management are like the

proverbial blind men and the elephant. They focus on a part of the enterprise,

identify an issue or problem, and try fixing that without considering all the

other aspects and systems relationships. These authors state that there is a

huge body of lessons learnt confirming that organisations that use this

reductionist technique never quite reach their desired objective.

Other authors that have observed the limitations of simplifications include

Caldart & Ricard (2004) who state that there is a tendency to impute

coherence and purposive rationality to events when the opposite is true. The

authors state that this assumption is consistent with the normative traditions of

the management literature that offer low-dimensional typologies such as the

BCG or GE matrixes and generic strategies to help structure the choice of firm

strategy. According to these authors, these analytical representations of the

fitness landscape that reduce the dimensionality and, in turn, the cognitive

complexity of the space, provide a strong guide to action. However, they citeLevinthal & Warglien (1999) as stating that to the extent that the


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representation captures the essential structure of the real fitness landscape, it

will be a mistaken guide.

To counter these limitations, Ackoff (2003) calls for the adoption of a new

management paradigm of synthetic thinking, which is a way of thinking about

and designing a system that derives the properties and behaviour of its parts

from the functions required of the whole. This is different from analytical

thinking which tends to simplify. The whole has properties that none of the

parts has. Analytical thinking can only yield knowledge about how a system

works but not about why it works the way it does. Most simplifications tend to

answer the how question and do not address the why questions which

requires synthetic thinking. Ackoff states that organisations, unlike

mechanisms, have purposes of their own. The mechanistic, top down and

simplistic views presented in some of the reviewed articles is therefore an

inadequate guide to organisations.

4.4 Principle4:Strategiesshouldbeunique:thebestonesresult

fromaprocessofcreativedesign

According to this principle, it is the specific situation that matters and

strategies have to be tailored to the individual case (Mintzberg, 1990). This

author furthercites Andrews (1965) who states that in each company, the way

in which distinctive competence, organisational resources, and organisational

values are combined is or should be unique.

In their article, Rumelt at al. (1991) also portray this view. According to these

authors, an example of an equilibrium assumption of use in strategic

management is that of no rules for riches, that there can be no general rules

for generating wealth. This means that if there are no general rules for riches,

then a strategy based on generally available information and unspecialised

resources should be rejected. Opportunities worth undertaking must be rooted

in the particulars of the situation. According to these authors therefore, theory

alone is insufficient absent intimate, unique knowledge of technical conditions


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and the ability to position assets and skills to create favourable competition

positions.

Rumelt at al. (1991) further provide an economics contribution to the definition

of strengths, which illustrates the view that strategies need to be unique.

These authors state that economics reasoning has helped to understand that

what we may mean to ask by strengths is what firm specific non-imitable

resources or sustainable market positions are presently under-utilised?

The emphasis on uniqueness is also contained in the article by Mahoney &

Pandian (1992). These authors posit that the firms unique capabilities in

terms of technical know-how and managerial ability are important sources of

heterogeinity that may result in sustained competitive advantage. Effectively

therefore, sustained competitive advantage is only possible under conditions

of uniqueness. These authors further state that an examination of isolating

mechanism (or resources that cannot be easily imitated or substituted) shows

that absent of government intervention, isolating mechanisms exist because

of asset specificity and bounded rationality or put another way, isolating

mechanisms are the result of the rich connections between uniqueness and

causal ambiguity.

Penrose (1959) cited in Mahoney & Pandian (1992) also emphasise

uniqueness by stating that it is the heterogeneity of the productive services

available or potentially available from its resources that gives each firm its

unique character. This author further states that the firm may achieve rents

not because it has better resources, but rather the firms distinctive

competence involves making better use of its resources, e.g. human

resources.

Prescriptions of uniqueness and creative design are also evident in an article

by Ackoff (2003). In responding to a question posed by the Strategy and

Leadership Journal about how managers can develop effective strategies for

the attainment of their vision, this author responded that it requires design,and designs that lead require creativity. This author proceeds to provide a


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how-to prescription for creativity, i.e. it requires that first one identifies the

assumptions that they make which prevent them from seeing the alternatives

to the ones that they currently see. Secondly, managers should deny these

constraining assumptions and thirdly, they should explore the consequences

of these denials. The result is supposed to be unique and creative solutions

emerging out of this process of design.

Muniv-Hernandez et al. (2004) cite Slack, Chambers, Harland & Harrison,

(1998) and McDonald (1996) as defining strategy as positioning a business to

maximise the value of the capabilities that distinguish it from its competitors.

This focus on creative and unique designs loses site of the possibility for the

emergence of unplanned and unintended strategies that are a function of pure

luck and chance

4.5 Principle5:Strategiesemergefromthedesignprocessfully

formulated

A number of reviewed articles leave no room for incrementalist (evolutionary)

views or emergent strategies. There is a view for instance that strategy as

perspective or position appears at a point in time, fully formulated, ready to be

implemented. This relates also to the view that the process reduces to choice.

The implication being that the strategist is able to line up alternative strategies

to be evaluated so that one can be definitively chosen.

The emphasis on strategic controls which is propounded by Goold & Quinn

(1990) and a number of other authors is in line with this view that a strategy

emerges fully formulated from the design process, the next step being to put

in place control measures to ensure its effective implementation.

Lorange (1988) in Goold & Quinn (1990) argues that to ensure sufficient

attention to strategic issues, there should be separate strategic and

operational budgets. The strategic budget setting would be a final step in a


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process that begins with setting strategic objectives, this being followed by

strategic programming and milestone setting. Thus the strategy has emerged

from the process fully formulated which makes it possible to set milestone.

Accordingly, Camiluss & Grant (1980) in Goold & Quinn (1990) are of the view

that once developed, a strategy must be followed by the development of an

action plan that includes a detailed description of actions to be taken,

deadlines and results to be achieved plus the identities of managers

responsible for monitoring implementation.

In their article, Rumelt at al. (1991) state that it is the basic proposition of the

strategy field that these choices have critical influence on the success or

failure of the enterprise, and that they must be integrated. It is the integration

(or reinforcing pattern) among these choices that make the set a strategy.

Therefore the starting point should be the lining up of fully formed strategies

so that choices can be made.

The view that strategies must emerge fully formed overlooks the views of

Nelson (1991) cited in Rumelt et al. (1991) to the effect that firms do not

apprehend complete sets of alternatives, but grope forward with but limited

understanding of their own capabilities and the opportunities they face. This

being the reality facing organisations, the premise that to succeed, firms

always need to ensure that all strategies emerge fully formulated from the

design process seems far from reality.

The article by Quelch & Kenny (2000) demonstrates the power of

experimentation and testing in strategic management. These authors discuss

how a consumer products company called Snacko turned around its fortunes

by reviewing and changing its production activities and product line. When this

company decided to introduce its new strategy of focussing its production to

its core products in its line, the company used one of its sales regions to

undertake a four-month test to determine the impact of refocusing core

products versus continuing line extensions. In addition to confirming thevalidity of their strategy, these authors report that test results also revealed


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other insights that were used to further refine the strategy. It is clear from this

example that effective strategies are those whose design continues to be

influenced by implementation results.

Farjoun (2002) concludes that the different mechanistic perspectives

approach strategic management in a consistent and mutually reinforcing

manner, which include; a view of strategy as a position or posture, which

implies that strategic choice is mostly a selection among static configurations.

When organisations have to function during periods of unpredictability, before

a strategy is articulated, the danger is premature closure. Articulated

strategies can be blinders, impeding strategic change.

4.6 Principle6:Thesestrategiesshouldbeexplicitand,ifpossible,

articulated,whichalsofavourstheirbeingkeptsimple

This view holds that strategies should be explicit to those who make them and

that they should be articulated so that others in the organisation can

understand them. The strategy must be specific enough to require some

action and exclude others. This means that strategies have to be kept rather

simple in order to facilitate this articulation.

In their article, Goold & Quinn (1990) cite Barnard (1938) as stating that there

are three important reasons for establishing a control system, first, a

fundamental task for any large organisation is to coordinate the efforts of all

those who work within it, and in particular to reach agreement between

managers at different levels in the corporate hierarchy on the plans and

strategies that will guide decisions and actions. Accordingly, agreement on

the objectives to be sought by all parts of the organisation is a necessary

condition (explicitness and simplicity). These authors further state that as far

as possible, the objectives should be precise and measurable, otherwise

there is a danger that plans will lack substance and specificity.


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In the same vain, Goold & Quinn (1990) cite Hrebiniak & Joyce (1984) who

state that to achieve long-term aims, it is necessary to develop operating

objectives that purposely translate strategy into manageable short-term

pieces for implementation.

4.7 Principle7:Onlyafterunique,fullblown,explicit,andsimple

strategiesarefullyformulatedcantheythenbeimplemented

According to Mintzberg (1990), this view is consistent with classical notions or

rationality diagnosis, prescription, then action, representing the separation

between thinking and acting.

The manner in which Ansoff (1980) describes what he refers to as strategic

issues betrays his bias towards giving primacy to the thinking before acting

dichotomy. According to this author, strategic issues may be a welcome

opportunity to be grasped, an internal strength which can be exploited, an

unwelcome external treat or internal weakness which can imperil continuous

success. The contemplative formulation process using the SWOT technique is

thus regarded as an indispensable precursor to implementation and never a

parallel or antecedent process.

Ansoff also makes the point that it is not necessary to revise strategy annually

because a strategy is a long term thrust which takes several years to

implement. So once a strategy is fully formulated, there must be full

commitment to its implementation without the need for regular revision.

Strategic issues management is also based on a model of assigning

responsibility for resolving issues to workers. Ansoff (1980) makes the point

that the success of SIM depends on making the projects (or worker teams)

resolvers, and not planners, of issues. This again betrays the separation of

thinkers (senior management) from doers (workers) in understanding strategic

management.


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According to Goold & Quinn (1990), the manner in which senior management

can ensure that individuals at different levels (lower level managers) are

motivated to implement the strategy is through personal incentives and

sanctions. In a way, this acknowledges and accepts the separation between

formulation and implementation.

The separation between formulation (thinking) and acting (execution) is

further re-emphasised by Prahalad & Hamel (1994) in their review of some of

the critique on strategy. At one stage, these authors state that at the extreme

some critics of strategy seemed to forget that irrespective of how efficient the

body (organisation) got, it still needed a brain (strategic direction). Classical

writer, Urwick (1944) cited in Miller & Vaughan (2001) saw planning as an

intellectual exercise, a discipline to do things in an orderly fashion, thinking

before taking action and relying on facts.

Barney (2001) also deals with strategy implementation as a separate activity

from formulation. This author presents two approaches to addressing strategy

implementation issues in the context of resource based view. The first

approach is where the ability to implement strategies is itself a resource that

can be a source of sustained strategic advantage. The second approach

suggests that implementation depends on resources that are not themselves

sources of sustained advantage, but rather, are strategic complements to the

other valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and non-substitutable resources

controlled by a firm. The formulation vs. implementation dichotomy is also

clear when the author defines resources as the tangible and intangible

assets a firm uses to choose and implementits strategies (Barney, 2001: 54)

The article by Goold & Quinn (1990) cites Roush & Ball (1980) who state that

a strategy that cannot be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is being

achieved is simply not a viable or even useful strategy. The establishment of

control objectives is therefore an essential final step in the planning process

(Lorange, 1980). Of course control objectives can only be developed once a

strategy has been formulated fully.


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Camillus & Grant (1980) in Goold & Quinn (1990) have another advice. They

argue that strategic implementation is best dealt with by deliberately

integrating the strategic programming and operational activities into a single

operational planning process which would include a statement of quantitative

goals (both financial and non-financial) and a description of action to be

implemented.

Ackoff (2003) in spite if his positive stance on systems or synthetic thinking,

falls back into the formulation vs. execution divide with a prescription for

strategy formulation. He states that strategy formulation must first start with

understanding what is happening inside and outside the organisation, then by

developing a vision of what the organisation could be within the emerging

culture and environment. Next by preparing a strategy for reaching or moving

closer to that vision.

Sheenan (2006) argues that brilliant strategies fail due to poor execution. The

author argues that diagnostic controls, boundary controls, belief controls and

interactive controls are the four levers needed to align what the firm desires to

achieve (strategy) and what is actually done by its employees.

The Social Learning Theory of Strategic Management (SLTSM) presented in

the article by Ginter & White (1986) and as enriched by the Stimulus-

Organism-Behaviour-Consequence (SOBC) model of Luthans & Davis (1975)

makes a clear separation between strategic planning and strategic

implementation as part of the behaviour of organisations.

In the same vain, Muniv-Hernandez et al. (2004) state that as all businesses

are in competition, they must first formulate a competitive strategy. In

developing a process model for strategic management, these authors note

from reviewing literature that the main stages of the strategy process are; the

establishment of main strategic objectives and performance targets;

formulating the strategy; implementing the strategy and; establishing strategic

control and evaluation.


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In their article, Paquin & Koplyay (2007) posit that no matter what relative

importance is given to various theories of strategy, the process of strategic

planning encompasses essentially the same phases: environmental scanning,

followed by strategy formulation, strategy implementation, strategy evaluation

and strategy control.

Farjoun (2002) cites Chandler (1962) who states that, in a standard design

model, the strategic management process generally consists of two main sub-

processes: strategy formulation and strategy implementation. The strategy

formulation sub-process is concerned with analysis and the choice of strategy

at the corporate, business and functional levels. Strategy implementation

comprises a series of primarily administrative activities and includes the

design of organisational structure and processes and According to Selznick

(1957) the absorption of policy into the organisations social structure.

In the article by Jarzabowski & Wilson (2006), they state that from a

representational epistemology, there is a Cartesian relationship between

thought and action, in which thought precedes action. Knowledge is thus

designed to assist this linear process in a prescriptive fashion. This is to say

that action is driven by reliable prior knowledge (Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2002) in

Jarzabowski & Wilson (2006)

To try and fix the problem of mis-alignment between formulation and

implementation, Ansoff (1990) introduces strategic issues management. This

author regards SIM as allowing for dealing with deviations from strategic

thrusts which may occur as a result of new

opportunities/threats/strengths/weaknesses. By assuming linear causality

Ansoffs SIM is an inadequate answer to the question posed by Goold &

Quinn (1990) regarding how strategic controls can be devised that are

compatible with uncertainty in the business environment, and with the need

for flexibility and creativity in strategy.

In recognition of the difficulties of separating implementation from formulation,Goold & Quinn (1990) observe that recent literature advocates the


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establishment of strategic controls to monitor strategic progress and ensure

implementation of strategic plans, but admit that in practice this does not

always work. They state that control systems provide the basis for decisions

to correct deviations from planned objectives. This largely assumes that the

formulated strategy is correct, the problem lies with how it is implemented,

hence the corrective action.

Goold & Quinn (1990) also mention that the research that has been carried

out suggests that, despite the arguments in favour of the concept of strategic

control system, in practice few companies have yet made much progress with

the development and use of formal or explicit control systems of the sort that

they describe. They state that the conclusion can either be that there is a lag

between theory and practice or that the benefits of strategic control systems

have been greatly overstated in previous literature.

The inadequacy of the Cartesian separation is also clearly represented in the

article by Balogun (2007). This author writes about restructuring at a British

utility company. The author concludes that the restructuring process at this

company dismally failed because on completion of the consultant/senior

manager design team, they had just closed the room up, leaving no team in

place to take the design forward and oversee implementation, in a classical

implementation following formulation premise. This created problems for the

company. The author cautions that designing a structure and then just

passing it over to members of that structure to manage the change ignores

the realities of implementation, which involve considerable energy and effort

to complete the detail of the design. The advice is to provide continuity

through design and implementation. Good planning is generally participative,

involving not only line management but also those who will be responsible for

implementing plans (Hulbert & Pitt, 1996)

An important and distinctive property of living systems is the tenuous

connection between cause and effect. The best-laid plans are often perverted

through self-interest, misinterpretation, or lack of necessary skills to reach the


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intended goal, resulting in frustration by managers who fail to understand how

their well designed strategies can fail so dismally (Pascale, 1999).

A further weakness of the thought and action divide is that it assumes that

data can be aggregated up the chain without losing much or distortions. Thus

allowing senior managers to develop good plans using information (reports

etc) from actors lower down the hierarchy who must be kept out of the

creative process.

5. INSIGHTSFROMTHEREVIEW

The forgoing review has highlighted some insights that practitioners in the

field of strategic management need to be aware of and be sensitive to.

Amongst the key insights is the fact of the pervasiveness of prescriptive views

in strategic management, even amongst those authors and researchers that

purport to be promoting the adoption of new paradigms. The extent to which

the prescriptive mechanistic paradigm continues to dominate writings instrategic management is perhaps indicative of its historical contribution and

utility. The schools of planning, design and positioning thus still enjoy a wide

following in the field.

Some of the reviewed articles assist in demonstrating the follies of an over-

reliance on a perspective that is often not reflective of the realities of

organisational practice. This over-reliance has seen other lenses for looking atthe problem of strategic management being completely overlooked or down

played.

The field of strategic management seems to be failing to effectively embrace

alternative paradigmatic lenses or a multi-paradigmatic approach. This failure

reflects inadequate levels of awareness of and/or openness to theoretical

alternatives amongst students, researchers and managers. This in turn is

limiting discourse and/or inquiry across paradigms.


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Further, the level of understanding of organisational plurality and paradox is

constrained. Lewis & Keleman (2002) citedin Bakir & Bakir (2006) state that

multi-paradigm researchers apply an accommodating ideology, valuing

paradigm perspectives for their potential to inform each other toward more

encompassing theories.

The adoption of divergent views to strategic management has a potential of

assisting managers to better deal with complexities and uncertainties that face

them in their work. Instead, managers continue to struggle to make sense of,

and implement, unrealistic text-book tools on strategy, most of which assume

that strategy is a rational and prescriptive process.

Grounded theory research used by Bakir & Bakir (2006) for instance offers a

concept of strategy that utilises, rather than discards, divergent and

competing paradigms of strategy. This represents a departure from the

rational schools and their critiques from the behavioural schools, depending

on the context of strategising, into a more comprehensive framework that

unpacks the complexity of strategy, pinning down its elusiveness.

A key insight is therefore that there is no need to discard prescriptive views,

but that they should be used in combination with other perspectives in order to

make writings in the field to closely mirror reality and be of improved utility and

descriptive value. For instance, Muniv-Hernandez et al. (2004) manages to

present a model that integrates deliberate and emergent strategies. This

model shows that a strategy, which is eventually realised or implemented, is a

combination of deliberate and emergent strategy, where the deliberate

component is only a part of the original intended strategy. Accordingly, this

author states that although planned, rational methods are not the whole story,

they have an important part to play in creating competitive advantage.

The limitations of prescriptive views are not limited to the field of strategic

management. Writing and research in marketing is also affected by this over-reliance on prescriptive views. This is in spite of an observation by authors


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such as McKenna (1991) who observes that it has been shown that the old

approach, based on the prescriptive planning school, which entails getting an

idea, conducting traditional market research, developing a product, testing the

market and finally going to market is slow, unresponsive and turf ridden.

There is a compelling need to break with some of the major limiting

assumptions of the prescriptive schools. Practitioners, including researchers

in strategic management need to accept that many of these assumptions limit

the ability of the field of to make a meaningful contribution to organisational

performance.

For instance, the over-reliance in strategic management on processes such

as forecasting and trend analysis needs to be tempered by an

acknowledgement that

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Critique Paper(Rev3)