We are the blind people and strategy formation is our elephant. Each of us, in trying to cope with the mysteries of the beast, grabs hold of some part or other, and, in the words of John Godfrey Saxe’s poem of the last century:
Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of [us] has seen!
Consultants have been like big game hunters embarking on their safaris for tusks and trophies, while academics have preferred photo safaris — keeping a safe distance from the animals they pretend to observe.
Managers take one narrow perspective or another — the glories of planning or the wonders of learning, the demands of external competitive analyses or the imperatives of an internal “resource-based” view. Much of this writing and advising has been decidedly dysfunctional, simply because managers have no choice but to cope with the entire beast.
In the first part of this article, we review briefly the evolution of the field in terms of ten “schools.”1 We ask whether these perspectives represent fundamentally different processes of strategy making or different parts of the same process. In both cases, our answer is yes. We seek to show how some recent work tends to cut across these historical perspectives — in a sense,... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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