Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 44

Strategy comes from a Greek word that originally referred to the art of military leaders. It was imported into the business context in the twentieth century as a way to talk about an organization's overall approach to goals and methods. Strategy has been defined in many ways. Mintzberg (1987), for example, offers five of them, all beginning with the letter P:

1 Plan: a conscious and intentional course of action.

2 Perspective: an organization's way of framing where it wants to go and how it intends to get there.

3 Pattern: a consistent form of decisions.

4 Position: the way an organization positions itself in relationship to its environment.

5 Ploy: a plan or decision whose purpose is to provoke a reaction from competitors.

Some of Mintzberg's 5 Ps focus on thinking while others are more about action. All are elements of a coherent strategy. Roberts (2004) argues that the job of the general manager is to define a strategy that includes objectives, a statement of scope, a specification of the organization's competitive advantage, and the logic for how the organization will succeed. Structural logic dictates that an organization's success requires alignment of strategy, structure, and environment. But, as Chandler noted in 1962, “structure follows strategy.” A good strategy needs to be specific enough to provide direction but elastic enough to adapt to changing circumstances.

Eastman Kodak provides a classic case in point. Kodak developed a strategy that made it a dominant player in the film industry for a century, but stayed too long with the same approach and finally ended in bankruptcy. Kodak began in 1880, when George Eastman developed a formula for gelatin‐based dry plates, the basis for the then nascent field of photography. For the next 125 years the company's strategy sought to build on this technology by introducing products such as the Kodak Brownie camera, Kodachrome, the Kodak Instamatic camera, and gold standard motion picture film—as well as producing thousands of patents in related fields. Pursuing this strategy, the company's performance soared. At its zenith, Kodak was one of America's best‐known and most‐admired companies with over 145,000 employees and billions of dollars in sales (Brachmann, 2014).

Threats to Kodak's film‐based strategy surfaced as early as 1950 with the introduction of instant photography and the Polaroid camera. In the 1980s, Fujifilm, an upstart Japanese competitor, was able to mass‐produce film and sell it at a cheaper price to discount retailers like Walmart. Kodak couldn't compete and lost a large share of the film market (Brachmann, 2014).

The death knell for Kodak came in the mid‐1970s with the invention of the digital camera. Ironically, it was invented in one of the company's labs by one of its own engineers in an era when Kodak sold more than 85 percent of cameras and 90 percent of film in the U.S. Upper management's reaction: “It's cute, but don't tell anyone about it” (Chunka, 2012). Kodak's protection of its film‐based strategy and inability to see that digital would come to dominate the marketplace led to its decline and eventual bankruptcy in January, 2012. What kept Kodak from adapting to a changing world? Kodak's structuring led to a system that channeled the activities and thinking of top management in one primary direction: film. In that context, any effort to promote digital cameras required swimming upstream against a strong current.

A similar thing happened at Xerox. Xerox researchers had developed the concepts for the graphical user interface and mouse, but the company's structure and business model were built around photocopying, not personal computers. Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft immediately saw the market potential that Xerox executives missed. Kodak and Xerox, like many other companies, were never able to capitalize on their own inventions because they fell outside the corporate mind‐set. Christensen (1997) calls it “the innovator's dilemma,” and notes that one reason firms get stuck in the past is that standard cost‐benefit analysis usually tells them that they will get a better return by investing in the tried and true instead of something new and unproven. As at Kodak and Xerox, the game is often lost before the numbers begin to tell a different story.