Journal Entry (Week 3) - Strategy

1.Why is strategy making like a science and why is it also like an art or craft?

2.In your own words and using referenced quotes describe the difference between intended strategy and emergent strategy

3.Choose two of the 10 schools of strategy thought and describe them in your own words. Try and provide a real world example for each e.g. an organisation or a situation

4.Write about your experience with today‟s case study. What answers did you give to the questions?

Self-asked question: Is strategy a Science or Art and craft to me? What are the differences?




I have however come to understand that in case of strategy, science and art are not mutually exclusive in fact they are complementary to each other. Strategy making is Science since it involves procedures developed by years of study and experience. While it is an art and craft because in new scenarios, strategies even gets crafted out of turmoil.

Intended and Emergent strategy

Some of the difference between intended and emergent strategy are:

School of thought

Positioning school:
Positioning, as the name suggest is related to understanding of the market/ industry structure, identification of a suitable position, deciding on a position, capturing the position and defending its position.
Example: Lamborghini
Understanding the market and industry Lamborghini operates in, it has decided to capture high end customers by providing them customized, limited edition super cars. They have been holding their position for many years now defending their position every now and then.

Entrepreneurial school:
This kind of organization has centralized power i.e in the hands of CEO. This school focuses of strategy formation as a visionary process where vision serves as the base from which strategies emerge. The strategies are developed based on intuition, vision, and experience. The leader posses charismatic leadership style. Such organizations are flexible and open to change and development.
Example: Islington College
Following its vision, Islington College develops its strategies so that it becomes one of the leading institutes that offer international degree. It has therefore developed its infrastructure to international standard, it organizes events and gives platform for students to develop and experience international learning, and it appoints international teachers for better education. Power is centralized, CEO being the head.

Case Study:I felt very productive this week. Solving the case study through the lens of theoretical concepts gave me a broad overview of how practical this subject can actually be. 

My answers were as follows,

“Google is not a conventional company, we do not intend on becoming one”- Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Conventional companies are those companies that believe in traditional method of strategy development. They have formal and structured and are rather thoroughly planned in advance. However, Google being one of the quirkiest companies believes in experimenting and exploring. These characteristics bend more towards the emergent strategy. 

The advantages of being very experimental are:

· Companies come up with creative ideas to tap the future needs of changing market. For example: The decision of Google to give away its android O/S for free allowed it to capture 27% of the market. 

· In this competitive era, experimenting with ideas can even provide a company its competitive edge. For example automatic suggestions that appear during google search helps to save time making it more efficient and user friendly.

· The opportunity of experimenting in many areas and spreading very thinly helps google innovate faster which definitely gives google its competitive edge

The disadvantages are:

· There is a possibility of stagnant growth once you run out of experimental ideas.
· It proves very expensive.

I think Google has understood that in this dynamic era, the traditional strategy approach have failed huge times for many companies that have not adapted themselves. Google proves to be vibrant. They understand of evolving with time or else turning into a digital dinosaur. It has experienced organic growth with few mergers and acquisition. Youtube, acquired by Google is a trending website to view channels practically on any subject. Moreover, its strategy to work adjacent with facebook instead of competing with it also looks great.
All in all, if Google continues to experiment and has plenty of growth opportunities, their emergent strategy works great in this digital era.

Reference:
Johnson, G et al. ( 2008). Exploring Corporate Strategy, 8th ed. Essex: T Prentice Hall, 564-584

Ten School of thoughts. 12 manage. Available at: http://www.12manage.com/methods_mintzberg_ten_schools_of_thought.html [Accessed on: 4 Deceber, 2012]