Strategy

How faulty decision making led to the ruin of a once profitable ordnance manufacturer.

Processes to solidify and streamline supplier-customer relationships can result in mutually beneficial commercial success.

A survey on supplier relationships administered to 447 managers from the major U.S. and Japanese automobile manufacturers showed that these firms do not manage primarily by strategic partnerships, but instead participate in various types of relationships. The author proposes and empirically validates a framework for managing a portfolio of relationships that will help senior managers answer two key questions: Which governance structure or relational design should a firm choose under certain external contingencies? What is the appropriate way to manage each type of relationship? The survey examined the specific investment of buyers and suppliers from both national samples in four types of relationships: strategic partnership, market exchange, captive buyer, and captive supplier. Interestingly, the level of investment made by either party in every type of relationship significantly correlated with practices commonly associated with strategic partnerships, such as long-term relationships, mutual trust, cooperation, and wide-scope relationships that include multiple components. No one type of buyer-supplier relationship & #8212; not even the strategic partnership & #8212; was inherently superior, which suggests that each can be well or poorly managed. Firms successfully manage supply chains by matching relationship type to specific product, market, and supplier conditions and by adopting an appropriate management approach for each type of relationship. Findings also countered the popular belief that Japanese firms tend to manage their suppliers using highly dedicated relationships or strategic partnerships. They appear to conduct business with a smaller ratio of strategic partnerships than is commonly believed (19 percent of the sample) and to extensively use market-exchange relationships (31 percent) & #8212; a practice usually associated with Western manufacturers. The author provides a contextual profile of product and market conditions most conducive to each type of relationship and discusses the management features common to the best performers in each category. By consciously and systematically matching the design of each relationship to its external context, product executives can stifle the urge to join the sweeping fad of strategic partnerships and avoid underdesigning and overdesigning external relationships.

Today's knowledge and service-based economy presents opportunities for well-run companies to increase profits through strategic outsourcing.

A methodology to aid in anticipating and preempting the emergence of market newcomers.

Determining which business activities to bring inside a firm and which to outsource is a critical strategic decision. Firms that bring in the wrong business activities risk losing strategic focus; those that fail to bring the right business activities within their boundaries risk losing their competitive advantage. A well-developed approach for determining a firm's boundary, called transactions cost economics, specifies the conditions for managing a particular economic exchange within an organizational boundary and the conditions for choosing outsourcing. A popular version of transactions cost economics requires managers to consider a single characteristic of an economic exchange -- its level of transaction-specific investment. Three concepts aid in understanding transactions cost economics as applied to firm boundary decisions: governance (the mechanism through which a firm manages an economic exchange), opportunism (taking unfair advantage of other parties to an exchange), and transaction-specific investment (any investment that is significantly more valuable in one particular exchange than in any alternative exchange). Firms can use governance mechanisms to mitigate the threat of opportunism. Traditional transactions cost economics does not focus on the capabilities of a firm or its potential partners, even though economic exchanges involve (1) cooperating with firms that possess critical capabilities, (2) developing capabilities independently, or (3) acquiring another firm that already possesses needed capabilities. The author describes the conditions under which a firm's decisions on managing its business activities should be affected by its capabilities and those of its partners. When these conditions hold -- conditions particularly common in rapidly evolving high-technology industries -- firms should make boundary decisions that differ significantly from what would be suggested by traditional transactions cost analysis.

Viewing the evolution of strategic management as ten "schools" of practice, Mintzberg and Lampel explore whether these perspectives represent fundamentally different processes of strategy making or different parts of the same process. Unwilling to be constrained by either definition, the authors point out that some schools clearly are stages or aspects of the strategy formation process. Under certain circumstances, such as during start-up or under dynamic conditions when prediction seems impossible, the process may tilt toward the attributes of one school or another. Thus, identifiable stages and periods exist in making strategy -- not in any absolute sense, but as recognizable tendencies. Despite this, the inclination has been to favor the interpretation that the schools represent fundamentally different processes. In cautioning against adopting a pseudoscientific theory of change in strategy formation, Mintzberg and Lampel note with optimism that recent approaches to strategy formation cut across the various schools of practice in eclectic ways. Some of the greatest failings of strategic management, they say, occur when managers take one point of view too seriously. Ideas and practices that originate from collaborative contacts between organizations, from competition and confrontation, from recasting of the old, and from the sheer creativity of managers are driving the evolution of strategic management today. Mintzberg and Lampel advise scholars and consultants to get beyond the narrowness of the ten schools to learn how strategy formation -- which combines all ten schools and more -- really works. The goal is better practice, not neater theory.

Strategy development requires that managers predict the future in an inherently uncertain world. Many mistakenly do so on the basis of perceived historical patterns that, according to recent scientific understanding of complex systems, do not have great predictive value. Complex systems consisting of many dynamically interacting parts are difficult and often impossible to predict because they exhibit punctuated equilibrium (periods of relative quiescence interspersed with episodes of dramatic change) and path dependence (small, random changes at one point in time that lead to radically different outcomes later). What, then, is a strategist to do? Beinhocker recommends cultivating and managing populations of multiple strategies that evolve over time, because the forces of evolution acting on a population of strategies make them more robust and adaptive. Because both biological evolution and business evolution are complex adaptive systems, to better understand business strategy, managers can employ a tool that scientists use to better understand biological evolution. An imaginary grid called a fitness landscape is an aid to comprehending how evolution increases the odds of survival in nature. In general, the rules for success in fitness landscapes also apply to business problems, though their specific application differs significantly by company and situation. The lessons of fitness landscapes offer an untraditional picture of what a company needs to develop a successful strategy. Because shifting an organization to this way of thinking about strategy is not easy, a company can take six actions to reinforce the robust, adaptive mind-set: -- Invest in a diversity of strategies. -- Evaluate strategies as real options that may open future possibilities, and remove biases that undervalue experimentation and flexibility. -- Diversify strategies along three dimensions -- time frame, risk, and relatedness to current business. -- Ensure that the strategies include sufficiently diverse initiatives in promising areas. -- Check that selection pressures on the firm's population of strategies reflect those operating on the population of strategies in the marketplace. -- Use venture capital performance metrics.

Whereas companies once focused primarily on outplaying competitors at a fixed game, now their central focus is on understanding the relationship between an environment's turbulence and their choice of strategy. By doing so, managers can develop better strategies that lead to and maintain strategic supremacy. This process begins with analysis of a firm's current competitive environment, followed by an understanding of the rules of the game in that industry. If a firm lacks the capabilities to succeed in the environment or wishes to challenge the status quo to improve its position, it might consider changing the rules. The ability to establish the rules of the game to control evolution is one facet of strategic supremacy. The player with strategic supremacy shapes the field and basis of competition for its rivals. Studies of hypercompetitive environments provide insight into the inextricably intertwined relationships among disruption, patterns of turbulence, the rules of competition, and definition of the playing field. Why is changing the environment important? Some strategies may work well in one environment but not in another. For example, strategies that are successful in fairly stable environments may be a liability in unstable ones. Whereas profits previously depended on stability and lack of rivalry, profits in hypercompetitive environments like those of the 1990s result from increased rivalry that focuses on defining a new basis of competition for customers. Extending the insights gained from hypercompetitive markets, D'Aveni suggests that turbulence creates competitive environments characterized by distinct patterns of disruption determined by frequency and their competence-destroying or competence-enhancing nature. The four competitive environments (equilibrium, fluctuating equilibrium, punctuated equilibrium, and disequilibrium) require different strategies. The goal of incumbent leaders and challengers in each environment is to achieve strategic supremacy by controlling the degree and pattern of turbulence. But, because rivals and customers are never content with the status quo, the battle for strategic supremacy is continuous.

Traditional strategic planning draws from forecasts of parameters like market growth, prices, exchange rates, and input costs that managers are unable to predict five or ten years in advance with any accuracy. Nevertheless, some firms meticulously construct strategic plans on the basis of forecasting that, in all probability, will be wrong. These companies tend to overinvest in building assets and capabilities that are highly specific to a particular strategy, relative to what would be optimal if planning explicitly acknowledged that forecasts would likely be off the mark. While companies may focus on executing a single strategy at any particular time, they must also build and maintain a portfolio of strategic options on the future. They must invest in developing new capabilities and learning about new, potential markets. By establishing a set of strategic options, a company can reposition itself faster than competitors that have focused on "doing more of the same." Williamson discusses a strategy that embodies a coherent portfolio of options, sketches a process managers can use to develop this kind of strategy, and explains how planning and management opportunism can reinforce each other. Creating a portfolio of future options involves: -- Uncovering the hidden constraints on a company's future -- both capability constraints and market-knowledge constraints. -- Establishing processes to minimize the costs of building and maintaining the portfolio. -- Optimizing the portfolio by considering (1) alternative capabilities that could profitably meet customer needs and (2) future markets or new customer behaviors. -- Combining planning and opportunism, both of which are essential to the proactive creation of strategic options. Williamson cautions that a company must keep tactical opportunism within the bounds of its overall direction, ruling out options that might cause it to deviate from its long-term mission. Short-term opportunism must determine which precise option a company chooses to exercise.