Predicting the future of strategic management

Predicting the future of strategic management

There are no strategic management models or techniques that have stood the test of time, Victoria University research has found.

“The pattern of rise and fall of such things as Delphi forecasting, vision statements and best practice benchmarking suggests that strategic management models and techniques are, by nature, faddish,” says Professor Stephen Cummings from the Victoria Management School.

The Professor of Strategy has studied trends in strategic management during the past four decades with co-researcher Associate Professor Urs Daellenbach.

“Once a large number of organisations use a particular model, leading organisations go against the grain and do something different to stay ahead of the pack.”

Cummings and Daellenbach have picked trends to watch in the coming decade, based on the past 40 years of strategic management.

“There is a move away from copying best practice towards seeing each organisation as a particular and unique collection of capabilities to be developed.

“The effective strategist may increasingly become more of a politician who leads ‘from the middle’ rather than the top. This means acting as a facilitator and connector, involving others to tap into and develop an organisation’s unique range of resources and relationships.”

Cummings and Daellenbach also advocate looking to the past to avoid reinventing the wheel.

“Creativity and innovation have always been key issues,” Cummings explains.

“For instance, ethics and corporate social responsibility were big concerns in the early 1970s and a lot of excellent work was written on these topics then. Only looking at the latest research can be detrimental to innovation.”

Their paper ‘A Guide to the Future of Strategy’ was published in the journal Long Range Planning and recently made Emerald Publishers’ international top 50 list out of 15,000 articles published in top journals in the fields of management, economics, marketing, information systems, accounting and finance.

The researchers travelled to Montreal in August to receive an Emerald Citation of Excellence award for the paper.

“It was a great honour for us to make this list alongside some pretty elite company, after four years of hard work,” says Professor Cummings.

Other articles on the list this year include one by US General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt in the Harvard Business Review and a paper by renowned economist Robert J. Barro in the American Economic Review. For the full top 50 list of 2009’s best papers visit http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/reviews/awards.htm

The research was assisted by a Victoria University Faculty of Commerce and Administration research grant.

ENDS

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