General Management Review

One CEO’s product development motto: care for innovation like newborns!,
Belkhir, Lotfi, Valikangas, Liisa and Merlyn, Paul, Strategy and Leadership, No. 3, Vol 31, 2003

Will your company be like so many “one-hit” wonders that failed because of their inability to adapt through innovation? Many companies meet this fate. As per this article, management shortfalls on the path to developing new market successes include: 1) A lack of the requisite skills and resources to sustain growth; 2) A CEO’s preoccupation with the existing business. This latter case should quickly be challenged given that the business environment will ultimately render any business concept an anachronism. The only way for a company to sustain itself is through conceiving and nurturing new business ideas that can succeed for the parent business. 3) Either no genuine product innovation, or so few the company does not develop the skill to cultivate them; 4) Entry into the innovation phase too late, such as Polaroid’s case; 5) Belief that an investment in a new business cannot coexist with the existing business. 6) The companies see true innovative concepts more as a nuisance or threat to their comfortable lives than as the offer of hope for a new future. 7) The ability to create an abundance of innovation but exhibit a peculiar incompetence in creating a market for it. The challenge, then, according to the authors of this article, is to foster a capability of innovation - not merely product enhancement. And this capability allows the company to migrate from one business concept to the next as the market changes and opportunities emerge.

Translating strategy into effective implementation: dispelling the myths and highlighting what works,
Sterling, John, Strategy and Leadership, No. 3, Vol 31, 2003

Several reasons are frequently offered to explain failure to implement strategy. Some are valid but many have merely gained credibility from being repeated often. By discrediting the myths, this article looks at a number of approaches that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of strategy implementation. One of the various reasons of strategy failure is the unanticipated market change. And, in this regard, the author of this article provides three preventive action: 1) effective competitor response to strategy - to out-perform competition, competitive intelligence is a must; 2) very little investment - if insufficient resources are applied, strategies will fail. Modeling will aid the executive to make smarter deployment of limited resources; and 3) failure of buy-in - insufficient buy-in to or understanding of the strategy among those who need to implement it will cause failure. Good strategic management is a function of people actively considering the strategy as they make day-to-day decisions in an ever-changing world, asserts the author.

From implementing strategy to embodying strategy,
Rylander, Anna, and Peppard, Joe, Journal of Intellectual Capital, No. 3, Vol 4, 2003

For most knowledge-intensive companies at present, the business environment where they compete is complex, characterized by rapid change and uncertainty. Employees and other intangible resources (i.e. intellectual capital) generally represent the most critical resources in the value creation process. In such contexts, conventional models and tools of strategy do not help crafting strategy. The assumptions which underpin many of them, the article pleads, do not hold in the present competitive environment, making them at best irrelevant, but at worst leading to the development of strategies that can put the success of a company in jeopardy. New metaphors for describing these companies and their competitive realities, as well as tools for navigating in them, are required, if the strategy discipline is to remain relevant for practitioners, the authors emphasize. In this paper, it is suggested that the intellectual capital perspective can provide a bridge to the practical application of a vision- and values-based strategy through the notion of embodying strategy in organizational resources. A conceptualization of strategy, that links strategy, identity and intellectual capital, more suitable to knowledge intensive companies competing in uncertain environments, is introduced and described by the writers.