Strategy as Leardership

VASSOLO, ROBERTO; WEISZ, N.

Stanford University Press

Año: 2021 p. 192

9781-5-03629-13-4

The most likely cause of organizational failure is the lack of adaptation to changes in its external environment. This is somewhat ironic, however, as many of the environmental changes that drive business failure are predictable and well understood, including changes such as the crowding of an industry with new competitors, radical product or business model innovation, and macroeconomic recession. Nevertheless, business firms continue to be successively ravaged by storms of external change; this occurs to such an extent that it appears no one is learning the necessary lessons. For decades, academics have studied the impact of changes in the external business environment on business firms. Yet managers fail time and again to implement mechanisms within their organizations that are capable of identifying these changes and mobilizing their teams to implement an adequate response. This book is intended as a practical guide to help business managers develop systems and processes to pinpoint external changes, work through their effects on the organization, and to right the organizational ship and steer it toward safety through tempestuous external disruptions. It focuses on the most critical and oft occurring situations of environmental change that business organizations face and, as a consequence, the strategic changes required of organizations to navigate them successfully, which we have typified into four categories of ?strategic challenges.? We have synthesized these observations into an analytical framework designed to assist managers and organizations perceive the onset of distinct types of environmental change and, therefore, the onset of the four principal strategic challenges. In addition to assisting leadership in identifying external changes and strategic challenges, this book is intended to be an instruction manual to guide business management professionals in applying adaptive leadership techniques when responding to strategic challenges. To accomplish this, the book uniquely relates adaptive leadership theory to conclusions and lessons drawn from strategic management theory and recent research in that field. We believe that the theory presented in the proposed book can help significantly to keep firms in business if it is applied properly by leadership in situations of external change and that, if given widespread application, it could lead to a decrease in business failure rates.