Rethinking Strategic and Cultural Change—Part I
Introduction
Strategic and cultural change are, as a general judgment, inextricable.
View them in isolation from one another if you wish. That’s fine if you’re a business academic or a casual reader of the business news. But if you’re running an organization, or if you’re an investor, there will likely be a terrible price to be paid for doing so.
This article, in two parts, suggests a way to get strategy and culture in sync. In today’s post we focus on strategy; next time we will turn our attention to culture.
As you’ll see if you read Footnote 1, these ideas were first presented in this form almost exactly 35 years ago. We present them now, virtually unchanged, because they are no less radical today than they were then, but by now they have stood the test of time.
—The Editors1
Rethinking Strategic and Cultural Change—Part I
Don’t bite my finger, look where I am pointing.
—Warren S. McCulloch
As a practitioner I am only interested in corporate culture if I can do something about it—that is, if I can either use the culture to add value or else quickly and effectively change it. So those are two reasons why I am interested in corporate culture, and why I do not suffer gladly those who insist that culture is either ‘soft’ and intangible, or that it is irrelevant to corporate strategy, or that it is slow or difficult to change. All three of these assertions are, in my experience, demonstrably false.
Normally, whenever I hear ‘corporate culture’ mentioned, it is usually one or other of three things. Either it is (i) an excuse for the failure of management action; or (ii) a white flag from business academics surrendering numerous, perfectly good options for fast and effective action that happen to be disallowed under the Rules of Engagement of some unduly limiting, ivory-tower sociological theory or even a best-selling book by some self-promoting business pundit or other; or else (iii) it is a call to arms, mustering the heavy artillery of the training department and one of the big outside management consulting firms in an assault on an elusive, ineffable enemy, who is never clearly described or even directly observed but who, it is hoped, will eventually fall before a barrage of corporate videos, workshops, cutesy slogans and pious hopes.
I see corporate culture very differently—as something quickly and easily deployed in amplifying the impact of executive action, or else quickly and easily transformed, not in a matter of years but in a matter of weeks at most. Moreover, for me, corporate culture is central, not peripheral, to both the devising and implementing of corporate strategy.
Here, I shall begin by taking some time in attempting to get clear about strategy as it appears from my own perspective. Then I shall try and map out how it relates to corporate culture. I will next provide an account of corporate culture which I find useful when it comes to changing the culture or utilizing it strategically. And finally, I will provide an account of an approach to strategy that I believe makes the most of the potential of corporate culture in achieving strategic change.
Strategic Planning
Human beings are planning agents. We form plans—from the simplest to the most complex, but ever incomplete—and we use these to guide our conduct. As rational agents, we allow deliberation and rational reflection to shape what we do, and if such reflection and deliberation were confined to the time of action, our rationality would obviously be severely limited. For deliberation requires time and information; rational reflection requires the opportunity of standing back from the heat of the moment.
And if only for these reasons alone we would need to plan. But more than this. In achieving more complex goals we need to co-ordinate our present and future efforts, and to co-ordinate the efforts of ourselves and other people—often a great many others.2
Above all, our actions always have their own particular lead time before they bear fruit. Things must be done now if they are to be of any use in contributing to the achievement of our goals some time later. The harvest may be nearly a year away, but every day of the year farmers have to get up very early in the morning to get things done—often urgently. In achieving more complex goals, we work backwards from the ultimate end-result to identify the actions that must be taken now, often within a very limited time-window.
To turn Lewis Carroll’s instructions on their head, we begin at the end and keep going until we get to the beginning and then stop. It is this working backwards from a grander future goal to decide what humbler tasks need doing in the immediate present, that characterizes the nature of the planning process. And of course the first task of strategic planning is to decide where it is we are wanting to get to in the first place.
So much for truisms. But where is the plan? Not in the heads of planners or in a nicely bound document or encrypted PDF file. If you really want to know where the plan is, consider what you would have to do to change it, and why we have only certain limited degrees of freedom in changing our plans once we have embarked on them.
For the plan simply is the sum total of managerial actions and decisions taken now, the resources committed now—here rather than there, to this at the expense of that—so that the future might be different from what it would otherwise be.3
Some actions are irreversible or difficult or expensive to reverse. There are physical limitations and lag-times involved in the reallocation of resources. It is the logical consequences of such constraints as these that dictate the extent to which we can change our plans and the costs of doing so. And these costs in turn must always be weighed up against the costs of adhering to a plan that is leading us away from where we wanted to be going.
“There is nothing more hair-raising,” said Beer, “than to see an implemented plan—unless it is to see honours and awards heaped on the idiots who went through with it.”4
These days, organizations are far better set up for the continuous aborting of plans than when Beer was working in the field half a century ago. The formal rules nowadays give managers broader scope for shifting gear, born out of increasing awareness of the need for management to remain light on its feet. But the organization’s culture, of which much more anon, may be something else again.
Consider: if managers are rated highly in the annual performance review for carrying through to fruition the projects to which they committed themselves at last year’s review, and if their promotion prospects, let alone any performance-related pay, depends on their success in achieving such objectives, they will persist in their folly (having become wise to these things), even if and when the objectives become at best irrelevant to, or at worst destructive of the best interests of the organization when the wider context has meanwhile changed.
It was said of the Triumph motorcycle with the hard rubber tires that was marketed in the UK during the interwar years, that if it ever got stuck in the tram tracks it would go all the way to the end of the line. Sticking to a plan, when the changed context has rendered that a really bad idea, is still the Triumph of many managers, scored at the annual performance review, but an own-goal for their company.
The saga of “No Variation’ Contracts” in the UK construction industry is full of hilarious cautionary tales. We know personally of a pedestrian door two-and-a-half feet high and an entrance-way with water pipes laid across it at chest height. And yet managing on the basis of “no variation from the plan” leads in other industries to equally foolish if less humorous and more expensive results.
Now achieving objectives is a good thing; sticking to one’s objectives come what may is a bad thing; the trick is in changing them in good time. No sooner do managers begin to take the planned actions or commit the agreed resources, than the situation is thereby changed and new and unexpected information is thrown up.
We base our plans—our present actions and managerial decisions taken so that the future may be different—on rational expectations set against shifting scenarios, and because those expectations and probable scenarios are both constantly changing, yesterday’s decision is “very probably and ostentatiously wrong today. More information has arrived, and ‘information [is perhaps best defined as] that which changes us’.”5 This is why plans, in an effective planning process, must be continuously aborted10 and never fully implemented.
Of course, each time we abort a plan in favour of a new one, the new plan is and must be devised with every intention of carrying it through to successful implementation, and it must be clear how this can be accomplished. The fact that in the end every plan will be aborted before it is implemented must not become an excuse for sloppy planning.
But be careful here: this argument that “plans are made to be aborted” is a counsel of perfection—it is the optimal way to conduct the planning process. The real world of business, however, is rarely about optimization; it is more often about expediency. And for the sake of expediency, it is often desirable to introduce a degree of stability into one’s plans, even at the cost of the plan being clearly suboptimal, in order that even the most inept and slow-witted member of the organization can keep abreast of what is meant to be going on and so play his or her part in it.
Yet in the continuous aborting of decisions that is the real planning process, the continuous intervening in what would otherwise be our organization’s free fall so that we will land on a more hospitable patch of the future (and that ground is shifting all the time), in all this we are still a long way from strategy. The continual series of changes in managerial action that we have been referring to are all first-order changes, the little changes that keep things stable, that keep things on course. This is a long way from strategic change which entails a change of course.
No Strategy
So where does strategy come in? Of course, there is no such thing as strategy. Strategy is a highly abstract concept, and a pretty broad-church concept at that, and the term “strategy” is used in a great variety of ways. We must be careful neither to reify strategy-in-the-abstract, nor to treat a particular firm’s particular strategy as if it were something real and concrete.
In general, when people refer to a company’s strategy, they are referring to the broader context that provides the rationale for specific actions, and so makes sense of them—the grand design of the broad plan being pursued, the superordinate goals it’s all in aid of: “what are they up to?” or “what is it we are trying to do?” When we refer to the “tactics,” we are moving in the opposite explanatory direction,6 focussing on the text within the context, the more specific moves by which the strategy is to be realized.
A statement of the strategy specifies, in general terms, the territorial position the army is seeking to attain, the market position the company is aiming for, in order that it can realize its objectives; the tactics map out, in operational terms, the detailed route for getting to that position. The tactics are subject to change at shorter notice, and change more frequently. They are adaptations for achieving more immediate goals that are merely instrumental in furthering the broader plan.
Thus there is a sense in which the general’s or chief executive’s tactics become the colonel’s or marketing director’s strategy, and so on down the line, for there is a recursive relationship between strategy and tactics. “Tell me the strategy” says “go up one level of explanation” or “I’ve got the text of the story, now just tell me the headlines”; “tell me the tactics” says “go down one level of explanation” or “thanks for the headlines, now tell me the text.”
But this has less to do with level in the organizational hierarchy than you might be tempted to think. Strategy refers not to the higher but to the more general; tactics not to the lower but to the more specific.
And often neither strategy nor tactics are required at all; as Quinn points out,7 even the highest-level actions in corporate life or in large-scale military operations often require merely elaborate coordinative plans and programs—simple, programmatic operational planning—rather than strategies with associated tactics.
If I asked you what your strategy was for getting home tonight, you would assume I was either being flippant or that I knew of some obstacles you were unaware of. “Has the motorway been closed?” “Have the trains gone on strike?” “Has my car been stolen?” “Has my driver gone off sick?”
A strategy is, by the dictionary’s definition,8 made up of a series of stratagems or artful manoeuvres (true to the well-known military origins of the concept), and is called for only if there is the need to circumvent unusual obstacles or challenges, and particularly where there are other interests potentially at odds with our own purposes. As Quinn points out,
A genuine strategy is always needed when the potential actions or responses of intelligent opponents can seriously affect the endeavor’s desired outcome—regardless of that endeavor’s organizational level in the total enterprise.9
The central role of “intelligent opponents” as Quinn calls them—other interested parties who are rational agents with purposes and plans and vested interests of their own—is brought out in Quinn’s definition of “strategy”:
A strategy is the pattern or plan that integrates an organization’s major goals, policies, and action sequences [or “programs”] into a cohesive whole. A well-formulated strategy helps to marshal and allocate an organization’s resources into a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated changes in the environment, and contingent moves by intelligent opponents.10
No Competition
More specifically, a strategy is a plan for viably avoiding competition. Not that the existence of competitors can be avoided; rather, perhaps we should say that a strategy is a plan for avoiding the competition—a plan for going ‘round them.
As Kenichi Ohmae argued in a well-known 1988 article in the Harvard Business Review,11 strategy takes shape in the determination to create value for customers and “to avoid competition whenever and wherever possible”;12 strategies are defined in terms of the former consideration and tested against the latter.
In striving to create value for customers one combines painstaking attention to customers’ needs with examination of the company’s degrees of freedom in responding to those needs, and goes on to rethink fundamentally what products or services are and what they do, and how best to organize the business system for designing, producing, and marketing them.13
Strategy is about a business creating a market niche for itself, continually adapting and evolving to optimally fit that niche, and is required above all to ensure that that adaptation is and remains viable. To continue the evolutionary analogy, what may seem a good strategic move at the time may impact on the market environment in such a way as to threaten the ecology and so one’s own place in it.
In attempting to find new ways of adapting to fit one’s niche in the market or to find—and adapt to fit—a new niche, one may be threatening the viability of one’s competitors’ own hard-won adaptation, and they aren’t likely to take that lying down. So one needs to take into account how one’s competitors will respond in their own legitimate efforts to maximize their own viability.
At the same time, creating and adapting to optimally fit a new niche, if it appears to be a successful adaptation, will, all things being equal, inspire other players in the field to follow suit. The niche created through the co-evolution of the company’s offerings with customers’ needs and expectations is likely to inspire others to make similar offerings to meet those needs and expectations. This is where the art of strategy comes in.
For companies as for species, a viable evolutionary strategy is one which ensures that others will not be able to oust one from that newly created and rapidly evolving niche. In short, once again, a strategy is successful to the extent that it succeeds in avoiding competition.
Market niches, like biological niches, are not givens. The biological world is not divided up into pre-defined niches waiting to be filled. An ecological niche is progressively defined by the interaction between two or more species and their mutual adaptation or ‘co-evolution’.
Successful biological adaptations are, for the most part, successful precisely because they manage to redefine the niche in novel ways to create room for themselves without directly threatening any competitors head-on. They don’t make a move that invites a tit-for-tat countermove; instead, they implicitly redefine the game.
Businesses, by essentially redefining the market for their goods and services in a new way and creating optimum fit between their offerings and the newly-defined ‘market’ for those offerings, similarly redefine the game. It is not that they succeed in muscling in on someone else’s niche and seducing their customers away; rather they define and thus create a new one.
Now if enough of the same people are involved—i.e. those who were their competitors’ old customers become theirs instead, then their competitors will need to respond in some way to maintain their own viability, and strategy needs to take that into account from the beginning, not as an afterthought.
The competitors’ response to a proposed strategy must be seen from the beginning—by design—to be such as to pose no threat to the company’s new-found adaptation.
Successful strategy is about cooperating with customers in a way that does not threaten one’s implicit cooperation (or ‘peaceful co-existence’) with one’s so-called competitors. The optimum strategy is one which effectively leaves one with no competition. Cooperation is almost certainly a more useful and important concept than competition when it comes to strategy; a “cooperative analysis” should prove more fruitful than any amount of so-called “competitive analysis.”
On this view of strategy, as a cooperative plan for viably avoiding competition, the most critical concept is fit. The effectiveness of any strategy comes down to the closeness of the fit that can be obtained and maintained between the company’s offerings and its customers’ ever-evolving needs, wishes, and expectations.
But let us remember that a strategy consists of a patterned body of tactics; the statement of the strategy gives only the headlines, stating the tactics gives the ever adapting and coevolving text. No strategy is viable or non-viable in the abstract. A strategy is only as good as the tactics of which it is made. “God is in the details.” Or in William Blake’s words, “He who would do good must do it in minute particulars.”
The “minute particulars” of avoiding competition, the “minute particulars” of cooperation—achieving and maintaining fit between the company and its niche, between its offerings and its customers’ requirements, these “minute particulars’’ are the stuff of which successful strategies are made.
The first and most critical—often the most creative—task of strategy is deciding where it is we want to get to in achieving our goal of viably avoiding competition. Obviously, the most effective strategy for avoiding competition will be one that is based on achieving a particular kind of fit that only this company can achieve, maintain, and develop further.
Given the company that it is, in all its minute particulars—down to the last detail of its culture and its traditions—what is the precise niche—defined down to the last detail—that this company is uniquely placed to exploit?
The word “uniquely” is used literally here. The task of strategy is to create a richly detailed model of what it is that this organization—among all the organizations in the world—alone can do, and to devise a tactically detailed way for it to devote itself entirely to doing that. Granted, this is a counsel of perfection, and no strategy fully achieves such perfection.
Many companies, particularly in certain industries, act as if they were fated to go for market share in what is inevitably a commodity market, and up until the point at which such companies wake up strategically, they certainly don’t appear to be tapping any uniqueness or doing much competition-avoiding. But the point is that this “uniqueness of fit” is the ideal that should be striven for, the royal road to viable freedom from competition.
To create this kind of fit in the pursuit of effective strategic change requires three kinds of reframing. To reframe, according to the classic formulation,14 is to change the conceptual setting in which something is viewed, and to place it in another frame which fits the facts of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby opens up new possibilities which could not previously be envisaged.
The first kind of reframing required is to radically reframe what it is that this company is uniquely good at doing. The second is to radically reframe the way the market is composed.
These two constructions must be undertaken simultaneously—the construction of the company’s uniqueness and the construction of the marketplace for its offerings—for this construction (and construction it is) must be a single construction, like composing poetry such that the lines not only convey the right meaning but come out in the right metre and rhyming pattern, and the result is the construction of the niche. (The structure and details of the practical methodology for strategic reframing—on which we at Interchange Research have done a great deal of original work over some decades—need not concern us here.)
The third kind of reframing required is by far the most important, although it is rarely understood fully or undertaken consciously and deliberately, indeed it is rarely undertaken at all; we will deal with it later, in Part II. For it is this third kind which is involved most directly with the organization’s culture and is the key to corporate growth.
No Change
Culture is the key mediating factor that will ultimately decide the fate of strategic change. Strategy proposes, culture disposes.
How often do even dramatic intended changes in strategy result only in more of the same? How often do the best-laid strategic plans come up against a brick wall internally, encountering no shortage of competition from within, never even getting the chance to test whether there is any competition out there? How many companies ‘get religion’ and decide to become, say, “market orientated,” only to behave in exactly the same old time-honoured and ineffectual way?
One such company that I had got to know was formerly driven less by the ‘demands’ of the market or by the ‘commands’ of production than by its own particular structure. Like many companies it decided to become market-oriented (as if there was ever any other desirable orientation to have!) and sincerely believed it had become so.
However, on occasions when its senior managers believed it was genuinely responding to the market, it was clear to any outsider who happened to be familiar with the detailed structure of the company, that it was responding to any perturbations from the market the way that any company so structured would be expected to respond, and nothing more.
In this case, its inward-looking culture simply plodded on, oblivious to the newly-declared market orientation and oblivious even to the dramatic-looking changes in its organization chart which in fact only served to reproduce the preexisting structure.
When formal changes in direction, rules, strategy, tactics, policy, organization, or what have you, simply fail to manifest themselves in any observable significant departure in the actual behaviour of the organization, it is corporate culture that is almost certain to be correctly implicated. More of the same—“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—is the inevitable result if one attempts strategic management by diktat.
Corporate culture is the orchestra. Strategy is the score. If any lack of fit between orchestra and score is not addressed, no amount of baton-waving will get the culture to ‘know the score’, and the result will be unharmonious at best, or at worst, cacophony.
.
Two Ways of Doing Strategy
Three approaches to “doing” strategy can be distinguished, that tend to deal with the strategy/culture interface in three quite different ways. Let us begin by very briefly describing the first two along with a mention of the general sorts of cultural obstacles they tend to face. We shall return to the third one in our next post, via a lengthy albeit necessary detour.
The first of these three possible approaches to strategy I call “the Requisition Approach.”15
Irrespective of how a given strategy may have been formed—whether initially formulated out of a formal planning process and then put forward for implementation, or whether initially emergent from the grass roots and only later given a degree of formulation to help it to be carried further16—and irrespective of where the organization falls on the spectrum from the most centralized to the most devolved, the Requisition Approach makes use of the organizational hierarchy in cascading down the work to be done in realizing the strategy.
Each level in the hierarchy presents the level below it with a ‘requisition’ defining what is required of it, along with the discretion required to carry it out. At its least effective this takes the form of, in effect, telling people what to do; at its most effective this takes the form of telling people what is required, and leaving them to figure out what to do. But in any case the requisition takes the form of specifying what is required by the level in the organization actually issuing the requisition. In this way, complex tasks are progressively broken down into subsidiary elements.
The paradigm case here is traditional Western military organization. At its most disastrous, the result of the inevitable ensuing environmental blindness is a situation compared by Hurst17 to military strategist Hart’s description of the World War I general visiting the battlefield at Passchendaele after the slaughter:
This highly placed officer from general headquarters was on his first visit to the battlefront—at the end of the four months’ battle. Growing increasingly uneasy as the car approached the swamp-like edges of the battle area, he eventually burst into tears, crying, ‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’ To which his companion replied that the ground was far worse ahead.
The Indirection Approach, by contrast, makes minimal use of the hierarchy as a means of breaking down a broad strategy into ever more specific tactics. Instead, managers are presented with a broad definition of what the enterprise as a whole is attempting to do, and are kept informed of their place in it and progress towards the declared objectives.
The term ‘indirection’ is not intended to signify “non-direction” or any lack of direction, but is a technical term specifying a particular mode of influencing behaviour, which is in fact quite powerful in achieving difficult objectives.
In the Indirection Approach, the hierarchy is bypassed in a sense, and those on the front line are told what is required—as a whole—of the larger organization of which they are a part, and they are kept informed of progress and of where they stand in relation to it all, and they are left to devise their own means of furthering progress towards the collective goals as best they can, where they are, and as they are able.
The paradigm case of the Indirection Approach is an alternative form of military organization. During the Second World War, the Allied forces intercepted Japanese company orders and successfully applied codebreaking techniques to reveal—to take an actual example of a decrypted message—that a small company of just five Japanese soldiers stationed, say, in faraway Thailand would be issued an order such as “Seize and hold Nepal.”18 The Allied intelligence officers would fall about laughing.
When postwar Japanese industry successfully employed similar approaches to realizing their strategies, however, that laughter began to sound hollow.
In 1958, Honda sent three men to Los Angeles with a total commitment of $110,000 in cash and $140,000 in inventory and spare parts, with a “Seize and hold Nepal” mission of their own: Mr Honda and his partner Mr Fujisawa instructed them to take 10% of the U.S. motorcycle market. Unable to afford forklifts they stacked the motorcycle crates by hand, and slept on the floor of an unfurnished one-room apartment; they placed ads in the trade magazines. A long time later they were joined by welcome reinforcements—another three executives.
Within six years of the first three setting foot on American soil (i.e. by 1964), one out of every two motorcycles sold in America was a Honda. The detailed story makes chilling reading19 for the devotee of the alternative Requisition Approach, with its analytical breaking down of tasks into subtasks (and subtasks into sub-subtasks) with the division of labour being tied to the division of tasks.
No company probably ever uses either the Requisition Approach or the Indirection Approach to the total exclusion of the other.
Both approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses; both suffer from severe limitations in the area of coordination: the Requisition Approach because of a limited ability to be aware of and respond to changes sensed at the periphery; the Indirection Approach because of the limited ability of parts at the periphery to coordinate action with other parts at the periphery, particularly as organizations get larger and tasks get more complex. Neither of these two approaches will concern us here much further, except to briefly spell out the kinds of difficulties each faces with respect to the strategic implications of corporate culture.
The Requisition Approach, too often, proves hopelessly cumbersome in effecting rapid adaptations in the fit between the company and its niche; cultural barriers to carrying out the minute particulars of tactics required to achieve the strategic fit tend to remain immune to change-by-requisition, and news travels upwards far too slowly to enable the continual aborting of tactical plans, whilst the periphery lacks the necessary flexibility to utilize cultural strengths to the best cooperative advantage.
The Indirection Approach, on the other hand, often seems precluded as a major option for most larger organizations that do not have the pre-existing cultural traditions of autonomous, innovative, pro-active, “Seize-and-Hold-Nepalmanship” at the operational cutting-edge, or whose hierarchical culture would quickly undermine any would-be strategic indirection. In other words, it is too often a case of, “It would be great if we could do it, but we would have to change the culture first.”
What I wish to put forward in this article is the suggestion that both the Requisition and Indirection Approaches—whether singly or in combination with the other—are too simplistic in their assumptions and consequently too limited in flexibility to be of much use in achieving rapid, effective strategic change in today’s rapidly evolving, increasingly cooperative [sic] market environment.
Now that we have set out the all-important context, we are ready in Part II of this paper to do the following:
First we shall put forward our own way of understanding corporate culture, organizational stability, and cultural change.
Next, given such a conceptualization, we shall summarize the shift in our thinking at the most fundamental level that is required to deal optimally with corporate culture in the service of strategy.
Finally, we shall proceed to outline our own “third way” of doing strategy which we call the Utilization Approach, and at the same time return to the postponed subject of the third kind of reframing that we cited above as being critical to effective strategic change.
© Copyright 1989, 2014, 2024 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
An earlier version of this paper was published by Gordon and Breach, London, in The International Journal of Systems Research and Information Science, Vol. 3, pp. 143-167, October 1989. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr D J Stewart and Prof. W J Chandler late of Brunel University, London for their contributions to this paper, the latter additionally in his capacity as one of the International Journal’s peer-reviewers. The original, published version of this article from all those years ago has only been lightly edited. This paper was first presented at a one-day conference of leading international business academics, senior managers and authorities on culture change: Corporate Culture: Strategic Limitations and Opportunities, sponsored by the Centre for Business Strategy, London Business School, 3rd March 1989. My views as expressed here almost exactly 35 years ago, have since moved on considerably in their detail, some thousands of organizational interventions later. Many of the ideas presented here may even in 2024 still be considered heretical, and no less so than in 1989. However, while I might say some things differently if I were writing this today rather than three-and-a-half decades ago, there are no significant views expressed in this two-part article from which I would now wish to resile.
Michael E. Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, London: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 2-3
Stafford Beer, The Heart of Enterprise; London: John Wiley & Sons, 1979, p. 337
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
James Brian Quinn, Strategies for Change: Logical Incrementalism, Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, 1980
Random House Dictionary (1969)
Quinn op. cit.
Quinn op. cit., italics and bold print as in the original.
Kenichi Ohmae,“Getting Back to Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, November- December 1988, pp. 149-56
Ohmae op. cit.
Ohmae op. cit.
Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution; New York: Norton, 1974
This is a perfectly workable and relatively enlightened approach to doing strategy, not without merits. I am not referring here to the outmoded but not yet extinct “Inquisition Approach”
Henry Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 1987, pp. 66-75
David K. Hurst, “Why Strategic Management Is Bankrupt,” Organizational Dynamics, Fall 1986, pp. 5-27, p. 12
Charles Hampden-Turner, 1987, pers. comm.
Richard T. Pascale, “Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Story Behind Honda’s Success,” California Management Review, XXVI, No. 3, 1984, pp. 47-72