A clear estimation of your industry's predictability and malleability is key to picking the right strategy style.
Perhaps, you should ask these questions: How predictable is the environment in which our unit operates? How much power do we have to change that environment?
Your answers may vary widely. Those answers give rise to four broad strategic styles, each one particularly suited to a distinct environment.
A classical strategy (the one everyone learned in business school) works well for companies operating in predictable and immutable environments.
An adaptive strategy is more flexible and experimental and works far better in immutable environments that are unpredictable.
A shaping strategy is best in unpredictable environments that you have the power to change.
A visionary strategy (the build-it-and-they-will-come approach) is appropriate in predictable environments that you have the power to change.
Note: Understanding that the point of shaping and visionary strategies is to "change the game" rather than to optimize your position in the market may be all that's needed to avoid starting with the wrong approach.
Allowing teams within units to select their own styles gives you more flexibility in diverse or fast-changing environments but is generally more challenging to realize. For example, it's easy to imagine, for instance, that within the automotive industry a classical style would work well for optimizing production but would be inappropriate for the digital marketing department, which probably has a far greater power to shape its environment (after all, that's what advertising aims to do) and would hardly benefit from mapping out its campaigns years in advance.
Finally, a company moving into a different stage of its life cycle may well require a shift in strategic style.
Once you have correctly analyzed your market environment (for the business as well as for each of your functions, divisions and geographical markets), you can identify which strategic style is most appropriate for each unit to begin to change over time your company's culture. Matching strategic styles to the marketplace provides an advantage over competitors who don't.
Source: Harvard Business Reveiw, September 2012
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