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Special Issue
Annie Pye and Andrew Pettigrew Theme Editors
Strategizing and Organizing
Charles Baden-Fuller Editorial
In many organizations, the processes that are used to describe
and discuss strategy are often far removed from those that involve the organizing
of work. At the mundane level, the setting of budgets is often undertaken
without regard to discussions about future strategy; and we have all seen
mergers precede new strategic thinking as opposed to going hand in hand. Why
do we do this? Why do we separate Organizing from Strategizing? How we organise
and reorganise influences the way we think about strategy and constrains strategy
choices; innovations in organizing bring new thinking about strategizing,
and of course vice-versa. For this reason business school MBA programmes are
moving away from course structures that separate strategy thinking from strategy
execution: there is a need for simultaneous thinking.
Two years ago Annie Pye and Andrew Pettigrew, two well established
scholars in this field, proposed this special issue to look at how Strategizing
and Organizing interface. After much hard work they have assembled an impressive
array of papers linking these themes. Their excellent introduction stands
alone as a useful contribution to how we should think about some of these
issues, as well as tying together the contributions of the whole issue.
The authors of the papers have taken a wide variety of approaches
to the theme. Jan Rivkin and Nicolaj Siggelkow use simulation analysis to
explore some counter-intuitive thinking. They suggest that organizing must
often precede strategizing because it influences the quality of strategic
thinking, but that we must also sometimes do things the other way round. Complementing
this theoretical perspective we have four contributions that look to practice.
Richard Whittington, Eamonn Molloy, Michael Mayer and Anne Smith show that
the way strategy is organised (such as how ‘away-days’ are presented)
influences the outcomes of strategizing. They stress that we need to pay attention
to how these processes happen if we want useful outcomes. Paula Jarzabkowski
and Evelyn Fenton look at the practices of strategizing and organizing in
professional service and public sector firms where there is pluralism of both
internal values and external demands, and draw important messages for academics
and practitioners. Colin Price, Charles Roxburgh and David Turnbull suggest
that organisations can achieve a pay-off by tackling questions of organising
and strategizing simultaneously, and use their experience as McKinsey consultants
to illustrate their ideas about how to monitor both a company's performance
and its health. And last, but not least, Ian Colville and Anthony Murphy use
a single vivid case example of Eli Lilly and Company to explore how effective
leadership in a time of crisis enables the two dimensions of organizing and
strategizing to effect change.
In summary, I commend a most interesting special issue for
your careful attention!
Annie Pye and Andrew Pettigrew INTRODUCTION - Strategizing
and Organizing: Change as a Political Learning Process, Enabled by Leadership
a.j.pye@bath.ac.uk
Core to any group of managers, in any endeavour, in any organizational
context, are the questions ‘Where do we want to go?’ and ‘How
shall we organize our resources to get us there (and beyond)?’ At heart,
these are simplified questions of strategy and organization which, on the
face of it, seem to prioritise strategy over structure: you need to know where
you want to go to before you decide how to organize to get there. This classic
Chandlerian view has had much support over the years, but recent developments
in both theory and practice of strategy and organization lead us to question
some of these assumptions.
Academic research has recently emphasised more process- and
practice-oriented theorizing, while contemporary organizational practice is
characterised by more complex, global and networked innovating forms than
in previous eras.1 So our Call for Papers sought to move the debate forward
to ask what these developments in academic thinking and organizational practice
mean for understanding the relationship between strategizing and organizing:
for example, is it possible to integrate strategizing with organizing and
if so, with what impact on the choices made by senior managers? Or are there
contexts and times in which prioritisation of one over the other remains critical
to competitive performance? These were the kinds of issues outlined in our
Call for Papers and we were delighted to receive an array of responses which
spanned a wide spectrum of perspectives on this important focus for business
action.
Our selection aimed to include a spread of academic and practitioner
viewpoints which in turn reflect a breadth of perspectives, case material,
ideas and insights about strategizing and organizing, both in theory and in
practice. However, while they each speak differently to the strategizing-organizing
agenda, what unites them all is their focus on the dynamic processes of changing
enterprise. Be it public or private sector, large or small organizations,
we have some fascinating examples of change from which there are several key
lessons for practitioners and academics in terms of our ability to make sense
of what happens in daily organizational life.
Amongst the five articles in this Special Issue, three are
written by academics and two are from a practitioner point of view, one of
which is a collaboration between an academic and a practitioner. They all
contribute, albeit differently, to the debate which we were aiming to stimulate.
Differences of definition mean the authors start from different positions
and with different perspectives, and hence shed different light on their different
cases. Indeed, one offer we make to readers is to take the perspective of
one article and use it to reconsider the data of another: this makes for further
interesting possibilities.
Jan W. Rivkin and Nicolaj Siggelkow Organizing to Strategize
in the Face of Interactions: Preventing Premature Lock-in jrivkin@hbs.edu
Motivated by real examples that run contrary to conventional
wisdom, we examine how firms organize themselves to strategize well. Interactions
among decisions make strategizing difficult. They raise the spectre that a
firm's strategizing efforts will get stuck in a web of conflicting constraints
prematurely, before managers explore a wide enough range of possibilities.
A key role of organizing is to free strategizing efforts and encourage broad
search. At the same time, organizing must ensure that strategizing efforts
are stabilized once the firm discovers an effective set of choices. The need
to balance search and stability, we argue, is a central challenge of organizing.
We explore this challenge with an agent-based simulation of firms that organize
to strategize in the face of interactions. The results shed light on our counterintuitive
examples. They show why and when firms may benefit from unnecessary overlap
between departments; how and when firms can increase firm-wide search by reining
in the search efforts of individual managers; and how and when a change in
organizational structure – e.g., a shift from decentralization to integration
– may reflect an effective sequence of organizing, rather than a reversal
of early mistakes. The disparate examples share an underlying logic. The unnecessary
overlap, the reining-in of managers, the period of decentralization –
all can be seen as organizational mechanisms that help ensure the broad, early
search that a firm needs when interactions among strategic decisions raise
the danger of locking-in on a strategy prematurely.
Richard Whittington, Eamonn Molloy, Michael Mayer and
Anne Smith Practices of Strategising/Organising: Broadening Strategy
Work and Skills richard.whittington@sbs.ox.ac.uk
This article examines three practices of strategising/organising
– strategy workshops, the project management of strategic and organisational
initiatives, and the creation of symbolic artefacts to communicate strategic
change. These are seen through a practice theory lens that emphasises practical
activity and the tight linkage between strategising and organising. The article
argues that, in a world of accelerating change, approaching strategy and organisation
as interlinked and practical activities is more effective than traditional
static and detached approaches that, privilege analysis. As change drives
repeated strategising/organising, it is mastery of the tools and procedures
that matters, at least as much as the perfection of any transitory design.
Drawing on a qualitative study of ten strategic reorganisations, the article
analyses particular vignettes of strategy workshops, strategy projects and
strategy artefacts in action. A common theme across all three practices is
the importance of hands-on, practical crafting skills in getting strategising
done. The article argues for a greater recognition of these kinds of craft
skills in strategy, alongside traditional analytical skills, and addresses
implications for practitioners and business schools. For practitioners, there
is no need to reject formal strategy making, as some critics have proposed.
Rather, practitioners can renew formal strategy by injecting craft directly
into the process. Business schools, as managerial trainers for the strategy
process, should extend both their research and their teaching. Strategy research
needs to move beyond its traditional domain of economic analysis in order
to understand the whole range of effective practices in strategising/organising
work, drawing on close observation of what strategists actually do. Strategy
teaching needs to bring the practicalities of strategising/organising work
directly into the mainstream strategy curriculum, instead of marginalizing
them into adjacent sub-disciplines such as consulting skills.
Paula Jarzabkowski and Evelyn Fenton Strategizing
and Organizing in Pluralistic Contexts P.A.Jarzabkowski@aston.ac.uk
In this article, the concept of pluralism is used to expose
variations in the relationship between organizing and strategizing and the
consequences of these variations for managerial practice. Pluralistic contexts
are those that are shaped by the divergent goals and interests of different
groups inside and outside the organization. Internally, these divergent interests
result in multiple organizing processes, while the interests of external stakeholders
lead to multiple strategic goals and objectives. Despite the Fact that innate
pluralism and the consequent complexity of strategizing and organizing processes
are experienced by many organizations in the 21st century, pluralism has been
inadequately examined in organisation studies and virtually ignored in the
strategy literature. Having defined pluralism and explained its implications
for strategizing and organizing practices and processes within organizations,
three relevant questions are posed for investigating the nature of organizing
and strategizing in pluralistic contexts. Case examples from the public sector,
professional services and regulated industries are utilized to provide insights
into these questions, and derive a framework that enables the drivers and
potential problems of the interdependence between strategizing and organizing
to be better understood. Practical implications for managing this interdependence
are drawn.
Colin Price, Charles Roxburgh and David Turnbull Strategizing
and Organizing for Performance and Health david_turnbull@mckinsey.com
It has long been recognized that strategizing and organizing
need to be interlinked, but organizations have found it difficult to find
a practical payoff from this insight, at least in part because of the complexity
of carrying out both processes at the same time. During their extensive experience
as consultants with McKinsey & Company, the authors have developed the
‘metaphor’ of ‘performance and health’ to articulate
the organization's objective function. This has helped them think about strategy
and organization rigorously without getting overwhelmed by the complexity.
The practical payoff from this approach is threefold. It
helps organizations avoid some common pitfalls while devising strategy, such
as focusing too much on positional advantage and not enough on execution.
It makes sure that the enactment of strategy is cognizant of the organization
and vice versa, often by allowing the same interventions to tackle both issues.
And finally it helps to define the sometimes-nebulous concept of ‘health’
in order that it can be measured and managed with the same rigor that performance
is. Doing this successfully will require changes in mindsets and behaviours
across the organization, though in particular at the top. However, as well
as the advantages mentioned above, it will also free boards to focus where
they say they want to focus: on long-term company health.
Ian D Colville and Anthony J Murphy Leadership as the Enabler
of Strategizing and Organizing i.d.colville@bath.ac.uk
What can you do when the pace of change and the unpredictability
of events escalate to the point where they can undermine company strategy
and the organization designed to deliver that strategy? When even moving to
more dynamic conceptualisations of strategizing and organizing doesn't adequately
reflect the vital relationship between them in practice?
This article argues that the best way of making sense of
the relationship between strategizing and organizing is through leadership.
The idea that leadership acts as an enabler articulating strategy and organization
during times of profound change is explored through the case example of the
global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, after losing control of the patent
on its major drug, Prozac.
This issue is available in full on-line at www.sciencedirect.com
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