Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company's Future - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert A. Burgelman is the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management and the Executive Director of the Stanford Executive Program. He joined the Stanford Business School as an Assistant Professor in 1981. He obtained a Licentiate degree in Applied Economics from Antwerp University, an MA in Sociology, and a PhD in Management of Organizations from Columbia University. He has published articles in leading academic and professional journals, and his books include Inside Corporate Innovation: Strategy, Structure, and Managerial Skills, Research of Technological Innovation, Management and Policy, Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future, Strategic Dynamics: Concepts and Cases, and Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation.

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1. Strategy Is Destiny

1 STRATEGY IS DESTINY

Caveat

A famous painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte shows a huge briar pipe covering almost the entire canvas. Perplexing the viewer is the neatly painted text underneath the image: This is not a pipe. Beyond the facetious truth that this is a painting not a pipe, the incongruence makes some viewers look more carefully at the image: If not a pipe then what is it? It also gets some viewers to think harder about the meaning of “pipe.” A mental search for the essence.1 In some ways, this book is similar to Magritte’s painting. Intel Corporation is writ all over its pages, but: This is not Intel. No single account could capture Intel’s multifaceted reality. The longitudinal study of Intel’s evolution, however, illuminates the essence of strategy-making as adaptive organizational capability.

Strategy

Strategy is destiny is the theme of this book. Destiny is an archaic idea of a fixed and inevitable future. Strategy, in contrast, is a modern idea, of an open-ended future to be determined by it.2 In reality the two ideas exist in perpetual tension. Successful and unsuccessful strategies shape a company’s destiny. But if strategy shapes destiny, destiny has ways of asserting itself and constraining strategy. New sources of strategy create the possibility of future destiny, and help the company evolve. Strategy as the means to gaining and maintaining control of a company’s present and future destiny is the common thread running through the study of Intel’s evolution.3

Strategy in the narrow sense involves planning the use of resources and the deployment of capabilities to achieve objectives and prevail in competition. In the broader sense, strategy also concerns the rational determination of a company’s vital interests, the purposes that are essential to its continued survival as an institution and define it in relation to other organizations, and its objectives. Strategy is therefore concerned with the external and internal forces that have the potential to materially affect the company’s destiny.4

Strategy has a strong thinking component. Strategic thinking is forward-looking and concerned with exploring multiple scenarios, alternatives, and options. It is externally focused and tries to anticipate states of nature and the behavior of the relevant actors in a situation. Incisive strategic thinking at its best requires considerable intellectual effort. But senior executives sometimes view strategy with skepticism, because great strategies are just that—great strategies. From the perspective of key players, strategy becomes real when significant resources are committed, when strategy is turned into action.5 Strategic action is consequential; it involves resource commitments that cannot easily be undone and moves the company in a direction that is not easily reversible. This view provides a criterion for distinguishing between tactics and strategy: Actions are tactical if their outcome does not significantly affect subsequent degrees of freedom to act.

Strategy-Making

Strategy in large, established companies like Intel takes the form of strategy-making, a complex process involving the thinking and action of key actors throughout the company.6 This implies that strategy-making processes can be usefully characterized in two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the degree of concentration of strategic decision-making. At one extreme strategic decision-making is highly concentrated in top management. At the other extreme it is widely distributed throughout the organization. The second dimension concerns the degree of simultaneity in strategic action to implement strategic decisions. At one extreme all organizational units act simultaneously. At the other extreme, organizational units all act in some sequence. These two dimensions give rise to four strategy-making processes.

Rational actor model. Many view the rational actor model as the ideal. A comprehensively rational leader is responsible for strategic decision-making and is able to get all the participants in the organization to simultaneously take action to implement his decisions.7 In this model, there is strong alignment between strategy and action. This model is probably most effective to respond to environmental dynamics that can be reasonably well anticipated and influenced.

Bureaucratic model. The rational actor model turns into the bureaucratic model if participants take action sequentially.8 In slow-moving environments this model may have advantages because it allows each part of the organization to optimize its operations in light of the overall strategy. In rapidly changing environments, however, this model will cause sluggish implementation of the overall strategy.

Internal ecology model. Distributed strategic decision-making and simultaneous strategic action define the internal ecology model.9 Strategy-making is shaped by strategic initiatives of differentially positioned participants, who all act simultaneously to try to commit the organization. This is a highly dynamic view of strategy-making in which coherence depends on the characteristics of the internal selection processes operating on the strategic initiatives. It may be most effective in highly uncertain, opportunity-rich environments.

Garbage can model. The internal ecology model turns into the garbage can model if the simultaneity of strategic action becomes sequential.10 In that case, organizational participants’ strategic actions depend on the sequence in which problems, solutions, and decision opportunities arise. The coherence of strategy-making in this model depends to a great extent on chance.

Organizational and strategic management researchers have long highlighted the difficulties leaders encounter in aligning organizational action in the pursuit of deliberate strategic intent. The cumulative evidence suggests relatively modest prospects for the rational actor model to apply. Studying the rare cases in which leaders achieve this improbable state of affairs may, however, produce insight that is useful for augmenting knowledge about strategy-making and strategic leadership. Viewing strategy-making in terms of the internal ecology model, on the other hand, is somewhat novel for strategy researchers, who find it difficult to see its potential normative implications.

Both the internal ecology and rational actor models informed the study of Intel’s evolution. Strategy-making during Intel’s first epoch resembled the internal ecology model, as multiple new business opportunities emerged from the company’s competencies in the new semiconductor technologies and competed for its resources, transforming the company. During the second epoch, Intel’s strategy-making resembled the rational actor model. This was a rare case in which a company leader successfully set strategic intent and created a process for its relentless and successful pursuit. At the start of its third epoch, Intel was struggling to combine the discipline of...