استراتژی مادی سازی: خطی مبهم بین تدوین استراتژی و اجرای استراتژی Materializing Strategy: The Blurry Line between Strategy Formulation and Strategy Implementation

How strategy becomes material After spending a good deal of time working through the strategy formulation process, most executives report that they clearly understand the strategic direction in which the organization must move and, more or less, the kinds of actions that will power the move in that direction (Mintzberg, 2002). For example, a group of executives at a medium-sized US-based organization that makes plumbing products for commercial and residential applications recently gathered to remake their corporate strategy. Over a period of three months, I observed executives at this company formulating their corporate strategy. During this time, they utilized a number of the strategy tools described at the outset of this paper. The executives began to feel that their strategy making sessions were nearing completion when the team agreed to adopt what they called a ‘market opener’ strategy. The idea was that the company would open new product categories and set design trends for high-end bathroom and kitchen fixtures (but not mid to low tier fixtures). The tools they had used during their strategy making sessions had led them to conclude that consumers were willing to pay top dollar for ‘beautiful’ fixtures that elicited ‘emotional reactions’ and that their R&D facility had enough technical product innovations in house and their design teams had enough skills such that the company could successfully open new product categories before any competitors. The strategy formulation meetings concluded when the team officially agreed on the ‘fast follower’ strategy and several actions needed to support it, such as changing the company’s product development process and shifting the way engineers in R&D were evaluated so as to encourage them to experiment with new product ideas based on data that were coming in from the market research department about consumer preferences at the top of the market. In this example, executives conceptualized strategy making as a process that ended just before implementation. In fact, as one executive commented in the final formal strategy making meeting, ‘Well, now we get to turn things over to the divisions so they can start implementing on this vision’. To implement this market opener strategy, the head of the marketing division decided that she needed to have a better understanding of where consumer trends were going, so she commissioned her reports to create a ‘design trend briefing book’, which was an electronic database that was to contain examples of various competitor offerings and prototypes, as well as insights into consumer preferences for product functionality, style, materials and overall home and industrial living trends. The head of marketing worked with her team leads to identify what categories of data would be most useful to include in the design trend briefing book such that the book would be useful for engineers in R&D as they mocked up various prototypes to show the executive team. The marketing team went out into the field to collect the data required by the design trend briefing book, but came back with very little. None of their existing channels could provide the data that they needed because there were few industry analysts who collected data of these types. So the head of marketing approached the CEO and asked him for a budget increase to hire more staff and to make a slight organizational change that would enable her team to organize in ways that would make it easier to produce the data they needed for the design trend briefing book. The CEO told her that the changes she requested were not possible and that she should be able to make things work with the resources she already had. Over the next six months, marketing produced two versions of the design trend briefing book, which were then shared with R&D. R&D used the data in them to create prototypes for new fixtures that were then presented for approval by the CEO and the members of the same executive team who made the market opener strategy. They uniformly hated the prototypes. The CEO proclaimed: ‘There is nothing new here. We haven’t done anything at all that would open a new product category. Nothing.’ The CEO was mad, the executive team was mad, marketing was mad, and R&D felt shamed. What happened? An easy explanation would be that the CEO failed to support the strategy with the appropriate resources. Although that is certainly true, a focus on the material context of strategy making and implementation reveals a more nuanced story. The executive team believed that strategy making was done once they agreed upon the market opener strategy and that the separate activity of strategy implementation could now begin under the guidance of the head of marketing. To implement the strategy, the head of marketing had to employ a technology (the design briefing book) that would allow her division to procure the data necessary to make recommendations to the R&D team. As the head of marketing commented, ‘There is no way to be a market maker without understanding the industry better and where things are going to go. To do that, we need data – and the design briefing book we created told us what kind of data we needed.’ The CEO and the executive team were unwilling to make the financial investment and organizational changes that would permit marketing to produce a useful briefing book. The result was a fairly inept briefing book that provided little insight to R&D, which then translated into lacklustre prototypes. This case is illustrative of the role that materiality plays in the materialization (or lack thereof) of strategy. The market opener strategy was based on a belief that the company could predict future trends and create a new market for those trends with new product offerings. But no one on the executive team knew what kind of data would be needed to successfully predict trends. What types of data were needed only became clear after marketing attempted to create a new technology to capture those data. To capture those data required investments that the executive team was not willing to make. Thus, the feasibility of implementing the market opening strategy, and consequently having the strategy in the first place, was contingent upon a technology that was created after the making of strategy had officially ended.