Strategy: the past made present for the future

June 1, 2008

Confused

Dynamic Strategy. A concept I came across today in my Strategic Management text book. It seems that Dynamic Strategy is from the contemporary school of Strategic thinking, and is what happens when managers react immediately to the blowing winds of change. To me, this is the same as having no plan at all, so can it therefore be called a strategy?

Strategy, as used in the business world, has its origins in the military applications used by the Athenians and Sun Tzu about 500 BC. The word actually comes from the Greek “strategos”, derived from the words stratos (arm) and agean (lead) which means “general”.

Naturally, post Industrial revolution when companies starting forming, strategy found its application in the business world as managers tried to outwit competitors, especially during the 80’s and 90’s with Michael Porters theories on gaining competitive advantage by clever positioning of your organisation and product.

So now, in the upheaval of the 2000s, when technology changes rapidly and enables rapid change, we are experiencing on the spot decision making and rapid reaction to change.

In theory this sounds good, but I’d like to point out that without learning from the past dynamic strategy is simply reacting, without learning from past mistakes.

I propose a system called “Intelligent Dynamic” strategy, whereby managers make decisions based on intelligence gathered from past experiences. Technology will allow this - but this requires investment in decision-making tools and extremely efficient data-warehousing to allow valuable INFORMATION to be outputted from the stacks of transactional data available.

At the same time it’s still important to have a an overall top-down strategy from senior management permeating throughout the organisation. At a tactical level though, managers need to have the freedom and resources to be able to make fast decisions to implement the overall strategy.

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