Arts Hub UK is pleased to bring you a contribution from one of this country’s experts on audience development and arts marketing. Stephen Cashman illuminates the art, and the history of ‘strategy’ in his paper, ‘Thinking Big: the conceptual background to strategy, marketing and planning’.
Thinking Big: the conceptual background to strategy, marketing and planning
1.What is strategy about and why is it so important?
‘Every company needs a strategy – either explicit or implicit.’ Costas Markides (1995)
‘An effective strategic management process has become the essential norm for businesses.’ Richard Hanscombe and Philip Norman (1993)
‘Effective strategic management is the ultimate aim of all managers.’ Financial Times, 1997
‘The survival, growth and prosperity of any organisation depends on the quality and viability of the strategy the organisation is pursuing.’ Andrew Kakabadse, Ron Ludlow and Susan Vinicombe (1988)
Indeed, such is the importance attached to the subject of strategy that one commentator on the subject, Richard Whittington (1993), reports that ‘there are thirty-seven books in print with the title Strategic Management’. Similarly a leading strategy thinker, Henry Mintzberg, and his colleagues (1998) note that ‘The literature of strategic management is vast – the number of items we reviewed over the years numbers close to 2,000 – and it grows larger every day.’
However, despite the importance given to them, thinking, writing and talking about ‘strategy’-related topics are subject to two main challenges, as is acknowledged by the warning issued by a leading thinker on marketing strategy, Paul Fifield.
‘The word “strategy” has become one of the most common and badly used words in business writing.’ Paul Fifield (1992)
The twin challenges faced here in using the term ‘strategy’ are as follows:
• First, unless the user is wary of how management terms can sometimes be abused (and thus end up as mere jargon), these expressions can occasionally be used more to create an impression of good management, rather than for their actual comprehended meaning.
• And second, there is very little agreement as to what these sorts of terms mean.
‘There is no single, universally accepted definition [of strategy]. Different authors and managers use the term differently.’ Henry Mintzberg and James Brian Quinn (1998)
‘Strategy is very important. But no one knows what it means. Every professor in the world has a different version of what strategy means.’ Jo Owen (2002)
The challenge of defining ‘strategy’
The roots of the challenge of defining ‘strategy’ rest in the fact that ‘strategy’ has always been a dynamic, evolving and shape-shifting concept. Initially the term came from Ancient Greek military use, where the word strategos described a general in command of an army. This meaning then changed to become ‘the art of a general’, and by the time of Pericles (450 BC) strategos was being used to indicate ‘overall managerial skill ’(Evered, 1980).
The earlier military aspects of the term were still being employed in modern times by eighteenth-century General von Clausewitz who, in his On War, writes of strategy as being concerned with ‘draft [ing] the plan of war…shap [ing] the individual campaigns and within these, decid [ing] on the individual engagements’. Contemporary business usage very clearly flowed from such initial militaristic use. Hence its modern business and organisational application was initially a metaphorical extension of these military notions.
What’s more, the challenge of arriving at a contemporary meaning or ‘strategy’ that is unified, comprehensive and consistent, is further complicated by the term’s potential to describe a number of distinctly different ways of thinking. Here Henry Mintzberg (1987) makes the pertinent point that there are five different approaches to visualising strategy:
Strategy can be thought of as being like:
So although this short review of the term’s early and current use gives some sense of where the current meanings of ‘strategy’ sit, a more useful approach to defining it is to consider some of the identified qualities that are frequently attached to it. It ’s also helpful to get a sense of where strategy actually lives.
So what ’s it for and where does it live?
One way of identifying both what strategy is for (its ‘purpose’) and where, in conceptual terms, it lives (its ‘domain’) is to examine real-life instances of strategy and strategic management practice as a means of distilling its essential features and characteristics.
For a start, ‘strategy’ is predominantly concerned with addressing the major issues facing an organisation. By implication this relates to setting and guiding an organisation’s future direction.
‘Strategy is concerned with making major decisions affecting the long-term direction of the business.’ Graeme Drummond and John Ensor (1999)
Part of setting the organisation’s overall direction will inevitably involve making decisions and choices about the scope of its activities. In this sense strategy rests on agreement not only about what the organisation should be doing, but also about the things it should not be doing. In turn this involves managing the relationship between an organisation and the world in which it works (sometimes referred to as its operating environment’). Consequently one aim of strategic management is ensuring that – as far as possible – an organisation continues to ‘fit in’ with its world.
‘[Strategic management is] a systematic approach to a major and increasingly important responsibility of…management: to position and relate the firm to its environment in a way which assures its success and makes it secure from surprises.’ I. Ansoff and E. McDonell (1990)
The importance of this is emphasised by British strategy writer Gerry Johnson (1992) who warns of the dangers of what he calls ‘strategic drift’. This occurs when the relevance of an organisation to the world in which it works becomes gradually diminished as things in that world change. Hence this danger is about not keeping up with environmental change.
However, if the organisation has a well-thought-through and well-implemented strategy, it will avoid this danger by maintaining the best possible level of synchronicity or fit between itself and its surrounding world. Ideally, it would change its approach and activities in such a way that they parallel, and take advantage of, opportunities cropping up in the world in which it operates.
Visit Thinking Big to find out more.
