Get under the skin of it
7. Strategic Action: Culture, Change And Leadership
7.1 Change
In considering the notion of change and our dealing with it, the poem by William Butler Yeats (above) serves to engage the thinking of complexity and in some cases chaos not as a special case but the reality of the world in which we develop our strategies, then whilst the design of our strategies might be ordered, their implementation is not. Pettigrew (1997:338) explains that
“Human conduct is perpetually in a process of becoming.” and that “… social reality is not steady state.” The trick for strategists is to catch reality on the wing rather than put it into a cage to hold it still.
Judging the pace of change is difficult. Judging its instigation is more so. Often in organisations when we try to stay still we find things are changing and when we try to change we are held back.
If management and leadership have differences (though we cannot discount similarities) in the way they perceive or cope with change and stasis, then we may need to consider what drives their perceptions or underpins their coping.
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So far we have considered strategy, and implicitly the role of the strategic manager. We have found perhaps that strategic management is more determinist or emergent than the classical planning and controlled implementation (predict and prepare) model would suggest. From the size and age perspectives of the organisation, the issue of management control appears to become less important or less possible at various times in the organisation’s development. This leaves a space or a time when other dimensions may be considered. Miller and Friesen (1984) suggested that quantum change occurs in moving between paradigms. Greenwood and Hinings (1988) and Greiner (1972) see change as a sort of steady state change or growth within a paradigm and transient change between paradigms possibly brought on through crises.
Chia (1999) recognises that change is an organisational (and life) reality and not a special case i.e.
that change is the natural state of our existence. This idea of change is problematic for us in that we see change as a special part of our organisational life. We have an entire discourse on
‘Change Management’ when in reality all management in action is change management – perhaps we need to consider ‘Stop Management’. A distinction drawn here is between ‘change’
and ‘rate of change’, between change management and acceleration management (or leadership) perhaps. The interesting difference here is between steady state change (within the paradigm) and transient change (between paradigms), both of which imply change to some degree. The
acceleration of transience is most difficult to deal with, analyse and synthesise – though sometimes easier to sense or feel. The issue arises as to who does the changing – the CEO or Director of Corporate Affairs or is it leadership from any part of the organisation?
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Steady state change opens itself to the possibility of the usefulness of strategic management – the controlling of the organisation and even to a degree its environment. Transient change may require us to consider other dimensions of the strategy knowledge project. One of these
dimensions might be that there is a need for leadership rather than management or that there is a situation of flux between the two. Strategic leadership may then be where voluntarism lies in the strategic development of the organisation. If management is the science that reduces the organisation into its perceived constituent parts to become separate and manageable, then leadership is the art that relates to the wholeness and the emotion of the organisation. Figure 7.1 sets out some of the
differences between the themes of strategic management and strategic leadership.
Strategic Management Strategic Leadership
Concerned with change Concerned with rate of change
Steady State Transience
Appeals to rationalism of science Appeals to the emotion and spirit of art Sees the organisation as parts Creates the organisation as a whole
Figure 7.1: Themes of Strategic Leadership And Management
Whilst we are unable to define management and leadership in an absolute sense, we can consider leadership in relation to management in terms of the sort of things these processes like, can do or appeal to. Basically management is about (or likes) order, control, resources and appeals to rational science (see computers doing information management) and tends to look to or re-evaluate the past. Leadership is about (or likes) chaos or disorder and appeals to emotions, aspirations, fears and looks to the future. These are not absolutes or mutually exclusive in individuals who may flip between manager and leader but exemplars of the possible different ends of the continuum or continua.
To consider the role of voluntarism and leadership we need to consider strategy in a slightly more specific way. Pettigrew (1997) sees a change in thinking and writing on strategy as the
consideration of a series of isolated ‘things’ such as actions, decisions, causes or events to the consideration of “… constellations of forces shaping the character of the process and its outcome.” (Pettigrew, 1997:340). The interconnected process (rather than ‘thing’) view of strategy relates to the notion of organisation meaning ‘locked in time’. Considering the organisation as a collection of repeatable behaviours (processes) from which a strategy might emerge is more helpful than considering the organisation as a series of separate static functions, from which a strategy can be joined together. Why should we expect arbitrarily separated production, HRM, marketing etc. to contribute to the organisation’s strategy in some ordered planned way.
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Change Strategic Action
Culture
Strategising Structure
Changing cultures structures and strategies of the
environment
Figure 7.2: Key Facets Of Strategic Management
Figure 7.2 attempts to show strategy in a slightly more strategic (rather than functional) context, as the interaction between the culture and structure of an organisation with strategising (the thinking about strategy) and strategic action (the doing of strategy). Boundaries between organisational processes are for our thinking, as in reality no boundaries exist – the organisation is a series of processes. Processes are ‘held together’ by interaction rather than being ‘held in’ by a container. One implication of this idea is that the organisation and its environment is not so much the static entities that say SWOT or PEST might point us to – but the past and future of the organisation.
For leadership, our environment is our past and our future – what was interacting with us and what might interact with us next. Leadership accepts and works within time seeing interrelationships, process and emergence as paramount whilst management accepts ceteris paribus, reductionism, things and puzzle solving as paramount. Strategic leadership changes the present in order to create a future. Strategic management accepts the present then plans for the future.
If we implement a strategy (do strategy) we change something – our organisational culture, structure or thinking. Bate (1994) suggests that strategy is culture and culture strategy so though inextricably linked, for convenience a distinction is drawn between strategising (thinking about strategy), strategic action (the doing of strategy), structure of the organisation and culture.
Failure to deal with all three elements might undermine strategy development, as an example, John et al (1997) outline the three periods of globalisation. Period 1 (1920-50) as Multi-national, Multi-domestic, Period 2 (1950-80) as Global, Pure Global and Period 3 (1980-) as Transnational, Complex Global (John et al, 1997). This model may be an alternative explanation of why the first globalisation in the 1900’s became multi-domestic in nature. Structure (including technologies) along with strategising could be transported to new geographies with managers but the culture transplant requires the mass media communication that only the Internet and global
telecommunications can facilitate. The strong wave of nationalism seen by Porter (1986) as the main driver of the multi-domestic model may well have become a pure global economy if the globalisation (Americanisation) of culture had got there first, as it so often does today.
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