DSpace at Khazar University

We believe that if a team can unite behind a board understanding of where they think
the business should be going, they can gain in confidence. This shared sense of
direction helps members of the executive team to make important operational decisions.
The feeling of direction cascades down the structure, and this will help to increase
confidence among middle-level managers.
It is the responsibility of senior executive to set the strategic direction for their
business or business unit. Some find the task too difficult, and spend most of their time
engaging in important operational or functional work. This reluctance to engage in the
strategic agenda is understandable. If you have no training in strategy, you have to make
your contribution in the areas of the business where you feel you have expertise. This is
invariably within the functional area in which you have built your career. But the
strategic implications of this understandable behavior are serious. The most predictable
outcome is “strategic drift”, where, through small incremental adjustments to the status
quo, the firm drifts further away from the more rapidly changing environment. This
eventually precipitates a crisis, as the mismatch between what the firm is doing and the
changed business environment results in a serious downturn in performance.
Often the crisis acts as a trigger for change, forcing the management team to act
dramatically. Unfortunately, the easiest reaction to a serious downturn in performance is
to cut costs. This rarely leads through to a sustainable competitive position. In this
rather negative way, however, at least the top management are forced to behave
strategically (“There is no alternative”).
2-5-9. Managing strategic change
We argued in the previous chapter that culture plays a central role in the strategy
process. Therefore, in order to understand some of the Issues in managing strategic
change it is appropriate to use the cultural perspective developed.
Culture and strategic change
In many mainstream strategy textbooks, strategy implementation is mated as a
sequential step following on from strategy formulation. 'Those who have wrestled with
the problems of managing strategic change, however, can find it difficult to identify
with an orderly. Formulation/implementation sequence managing strategic is often
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