The Emergent Approach To Strategy

A NEW CLARITY FOR STRATEGY THEORY AND PRACTICE Consultants and academics continue to report chronic failures of strategy practice.Two causes dominate: strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned versus adaptive view of the world. The Emergent Approach to Strategy digs deep into complex adaptive systems to bring a new clarity to strategy function and incorporate this understanding into practice. The emergent approach practice includes: An agile method for strategy framework design Scenario and bottleneck diagnosis techniques A four-station dashboard emphasizing execution A new set of strategy tests called the five disqualifiers Go to emergentapproach.com to access the following resources: Chapter supplements with appendixes, commentary, and added examples Five Task Sets: a guidebook for implementation of the approach Templates for use in strategy materials Additional examples of the Five Disqualifiers in various fields of endeavor

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal - the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. Change is constant. This book is about how we can shape the changes we experience to match our intentions using strategic methods that are as adaptive, resilient decentralised, and interdependent as the patterns of flocking birds or differentiating cells. A secular spirituality based equally on science and science fiction.

"Ionut Popescu explores how successful American grand strategy comes about. For most experts in the academic world of political science and in the Washington policymaking community, the answer lies in the design and implementation of a farsighted strategic plan or framework. The role of such a Grand Design is to guide the president's foreign policy actions and resource allocation decisions in the pursuit of specific long-term objectives. The alternative to following a Grand Design is usually said to consist of ad-hoc, incoherent, and ultimately unsuccessful foreign policy decision-making. But what if successful grand strategies are sometimes formed through an emergent process of learning and adaptation, instead of being the product of strategic planning and farsighted designs? Popescu argues that the Emergent Strategy model, adapted from the business strategy literature, explains some of the traditional success stories and failures of American grand strategy better than the prevalent Grand Design model. These findings suggest the need to shift the focus of policymakers away from planning for long-term objectives and toward short- and medium-term incremental learning and adaptation. Based on this new theoretical understanding of successful grand strategy being formed by either Design or Emergent elements depending on the circumstances, the book also offers a framework to help policymakers and strategic planners choose the right model and tools based on the level of uncertainty they face in the external environment"--

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management has been written by an international team of leading academics, practitioners and rising stars and contains almost 550 individually commissioned entries. It is the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field and covers both the theoretical and more empirically/practitioner oriented side of the discipline.

Enough of the imbalance that is causing the degradation of our environment, the demise of our democracies, and the denigration of ourselves. Enough of the pendulum politics of left and right and paralysis in the political center. We require an unprecedented form of radical renewal. In this book Henry Mintzberg offers a new understanding of the root of our current crisis and a strategy for restoring the balance so vital to the survival of our progeny and our planet. With the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, Western pundits declared that capitalism had triumphed. They were wrong—balance triumphed. A healthy society balances a public sector of respected governments, a private sector of responsible businesses, and a plural sector of robust communities. Communism collapsed under the weight of its overbearing public sector. Now the “liberal democracies” are threatened—socially, politically, even economically—by the unchecked excesses of the private sector. Radical renewal will have to begin in the plural sector, which alone has the inclination and the independence to challenge unacceptable practices and develop better ones. Too many governments have been co-opted by the private sector. And corporate social responsibility can't compensate for the corporate social irresponsibility we see around us “They” won't do it. We shall have to do it, each of us and all of us, not as passive “human resources,” but as resourceful human beings. Tom Paine wrote in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He was right then. Can we be right again now? Can we afford not to be?

Strategic Management (2020) is a 325-page open educational resource designed as an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The open textbook is intended for a senior capstone course in an undergraduate business program and suitable for a wide range of undergraduate business students including those majoring in marketing, management, business administration, accounting, finance, real estate, business information technology, and hospitality and tourism. The text presents examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today's firms and how they go about implementing those strategies. It includes case studies, end of section key takeaways, exercises, and links to external videos, and an end-of-book glossary. The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.