Assignment 1

As modern organizations are working in continuously demanding and changing

environment, thus require a regular monitoring of environment and necessary adaption of

changes accordingly. Managers are increasingly confronting with a complicated, vague

and vigorously changing environment and organizational factors across all levels,

managers and non-managers both are likely to adapt process, make sense out of it, then

propagate a confound stream of information in order to solve problems and make

decisions. Certainly, such are the levels of chaos, stress and fluctuation within the modern

workplace that D’Avini (1994) defined as the term ‘hyper-competition’ in an effort to

summarize the conventional organizational reaction to this state of matters.

Strategic competence can be defined as the ability of organizations (or more accurately

its employees) to obtain, collect, monitor, make sense and act upon information of

importance in order to survive for longer run and for the well-being of organization. By

utilizing the strategically insights like RBV of the firm (Grant, 1996), this core

competence makes effort to combine together characteristics of both individuals and

organization, appropriately constructed to ensure that organization actively detect even a

weak signal of change and then act accordingly, , thereby reducing the risks of cognitive

immobility and mental preconception. These signs of change are then selected, filtered

and portray in such a way that allows specific groups and individuals to react

conveniently to the unforeseen triumph.

However, its purpose is not to prove that organizations or individuals are nothing more

than inactive processors of information, but to emphasize the importance of active

strategic competence and its ability to continuously shape the sense out of collected

information (Gioia and Chittipendi, 1991; Maitlis, 2005). Therefore, strategic

competence is nothing more than combination of calculated processes that includes social

variables as well (Lant and Shapira, 2001a, 2001b). Thus, providing concrete evidence

that organizations growth and survival rate immensely depend upon the insightful and

competent strategies. Organizations need to build up a system that predict the changing

environment abruptly and then have competent strategy to meet up the expectations.

Moreover, it also helps to keep the organization on its goal path and thus provides right

directions to success.

Indeed some sectors of industry and some organizations require more from strategic

management than others. For instance, private sectors need to adapt the changes more

rapidly and accurately than government sector organizations. The main reason is that

government policies do not require a change for a calculated period of time, whereas in

private sectors things change with the blink of an eye. Similarly, suppliers of raw

materials to manufacturers of end product face less vigorous environment than the

manufacturers of end products. Hence it is clear for sure that strategic management is

more important for some organizations or industries than some others.

As argued above, strategic competence needs the patterns of elaborated subjective maps.

However, there lies a possible crisis. Strategic managers need to be capable of accessing

and processing a large amount of information with concern to details. We can often

found, what we are looking for, in these details and attain real insights that will stop

organizations to launch series of actions which may result in failure from the beginning

or may allow organizations to identify the unexpected problems before they emerge, so as

to be capable of taking the corrective actions. On the other side, too much of information

may also prove to be dubious or fad, depending upon the finite processing competencies

of the individual manager to refine information. It is clear that two types of expertise are

desired in order to deal with this complicated state of affairs. In order to process details

analytical skills set is need with a complementary set of skills that require individuals to

continuously monitor the big picture in a more comprehensive way.

References:

D’Avini, R.A.I. (1994). Hypercompetition. New York: Free Press.

Grant, R. M. (1996). ‘Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm’. Strategic Management

Journal, 17, 109-122.

Gioia, D.A. and Chittipeddi, K. (1991). ‘Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic initiation’.

Strategic Management Journal, 12, 433-48. Gioia, D.A. and Ford, C.M. (1996).

‘Tacit knowledge, self-communications, and sense making in organizations’. In L. Thayer (Ed.)

Organization Communication: Emerging Perspectives. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Pp. 83-102.

Lant, T.K. and Shapira, Z. (2001b). ‘Introduction: Foundations of research on cognition in

organizations’. In T.K. Lant and Z. Shapira (eds), Organizational Cognition: Computation and

Interpretation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Lant, T.K. and Shapira, Z. (Eds.) (2001a). Organizational Cognition: Computation and

Interpretation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.