Full-on Open-Strategy: when strategy is a job for us all
By Jean-Louis Magakian, a Professor of Strategy and Management at emlyon business school.
How does strategizing evolve under the pressure of hyper-competition? How do shareholders, directors, managers and all other stakeholders in business success, work together to assess a potential competitive advantage? On the whole, is strategy now, a job for us all? Following Chesbrough’s open-innovation*, strategizing has turned into an ever more collective issue, a cooperation challenge, with a transparent environment inclusive of all ideas to win the competitive struggle.
When integrating collaborative technologies, competitive management needs to highlight the various understandings, interactive communications, operation oriented ideas and actions, in order for them to emerge on the strategic level of organizations. Open-Strategy (see Cambridge Handbook of Open Strategy, David Seidl, Georg von Krogh & Richard Whittington, 2019) has turned into a competitive practice allowing for rapid coordination/combination between operations and strategic decisions. This is no suggestion box, or no talk group. We are dealing here with a continuous adjustment of decisions to collective actions.
Strategizing is still a company’s best asset when it comes to achieving and maintaining economic advantage over competitors. Historically, companies had to establish a multiyear plan in which they attempted to stay a step ahead in their investments. Strategizing consisted mainly in investing capitals before competitors did, in order to preempt sources of performance. Thus, under the influence of business schools which massively taught this half-financial, half economic and not yet organizational approach, planning became a shared practice. Later on, with the shift of business schools, conditions for competitiveness came to depend mainly on the organization and management quality. Strategizing was then a question of collective competences and skills. Managerial thinking followed suit, and became a shared thinking. Companies are now staffed with people who know all the ins and outs of fellow competitors. Everyone can actually observe, understand or comment the company’s competitive conditions; everyone can be critical of the validity of decisions in a competitive market, and most of the time, quite rightly at that. To go even further, with collaborative practices, everyone is able to perceive ideas or take to rallying resources as a contribution to company performance. With strategic issues now open, all stakeholders can engage in strategy discussions allowing for idea and daily action adjustments. That’s when Open-Strategy becomes a source of competitiveness. Thus strategy is implemented like a collaborative method; it is no longer a top management’s private turf, a top management who, in any case, no longer controls neither decision time, nor information asymmetry, in political worlds becoming more and more kaleidic**.
Transparency and inclusion
When put into practice, Open-Strategy requires two new managerial dimensions: transparency and inclusion of both internal and external personalities. This means that the doors to strategy thinking must be open, in order to retrieve ideas and competitive resources. Transparency assumes discussion oriented workspaces. Inclusion requires to understand each stakeholder as endowed with key information to be explained, to be showcased and to be included in a forever transitory pattern. Using collaborative technologies will allow this opening and this dynamic. It has thus become possible to open collaborative blogs for staff members and key externals, to broaden thinking sources with more than several hundred participants. Business digitalization too, implies digitalization of strategizing via opened and shared technologies!
All of a sudden, strategic managerial skills radically changed. Initially, managerial skills consisted in getting under control plans, expertise and existing central technologies. With Open-Strategy, it is all about overcoming the impact of an increasingly closer regulation, with coworkers increasingly working like freelancers, with platform organizations increasingly straddling national frontiers, with extremely volatile expertise, and with increasing risks due to the acceleration of political, economic and social conditions. Not only did Open-Strategy make a clean break with the way management was taught and practiced, but also with companies’ future value. Should strategizing remain the top management’s private turf, staff members would no longer provide their added value, just their mere attendance time.
*Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, 2003.
** Georges Shackle had anticipated in the 70s the idea of disruption, as he described economy and societies undergoing rapid reversals in a one and only framework. Hence this notion of kaleidoscope.
Jean-Louis Magakian has been working as a strategic consultant for ten years before switching to an academic career. His research aims at exploring cognition in the workplace, strategy and collective intelligence. He also works on cognitive sciences in organizations and Activity Theory as well as on language in ideation making. He teaches business history, strategic thinking and strategic change to both Master in science and executive participants.
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This article was published in Courrier Cadre n°123 (october-november 2019).
