Strategic Flexibility

Warren Buffet about Noah’s ark - “Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.”                              Think about it...action speaks louder than words!

Technological/digital revolution and expanding globalization are creating a new competitive landscape, whereby your survival and sustainability depends on your strategic flexibility or agility. The strategic transformation is imperative to any firm or professional to develop and maintain competitive advantage successfully. Hence, according to Shimizu & Hitt (2004), an organization is required to exercise strategic leadership, develop dynamic core competences, focus and develop human capital, effectively use data, new information, digital technologies, employ valuable strategies (exploiting global markets and partnership strategies) and implementing new organizational structures and culture (horizontal organization, learning and innovative culture, managing firm as bundles of assets). Thus, the new competitive landscape will require people with exceptional talents, new leadership skills or professionals with flexible attitudes for survival and global market transformation.

I previously worked with a large company B in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. The CEO created a group call ‘Macro-strategy,’ which had the mandate of communicating the firm’s strategy throughout the company on a weekly basis. Thus, it was able to inform the heads of departments of any environmental changes in the industry so that the they in turn could also debrief their direct reports on a weekly basis. They have the ability to circumnavigate effectively in any new competitive landscape, build and maintain competitive advantage in cooperation with any department of the company. For example, it was once discovered that an employee of one of the company’s department had attracted HIV. The Macro-strategy group used its strategic flexibility mechanisms to resolve the issue effectively and efficiently. They worked with the operations department to suspend the employee with pay, got him immediate medical assistance, destroyed all of the six sub-categories of products that the employee had worked on and touched. Offered to reimburse any customer who had purchased products from that specific department within the past four weeks, the same tenure of the employee. Lastly, they issued a public apology to all customers. The result was a success and the customer trust and goodwill of the company was maintained. The Macro-strategy group had the strategic flexibility ability of making certain that the company responds to changes in the environment in a timely and appropriate manner with due regard to the competitive forces in the marketplace.

A former CEO of Gap Inc., used to work for this company B, and was able to bring the same strategic flexibility, policies and practices to the Gap Inc. According to Hatch and Zweig (2001), sustainability is established by aligning strategy closely with the supporting activities. They posited that The Gap is one example of tight alignment between activities and the underlying strategy. The Gap has closely aligned its inventory replenishment systems with its strategy of ensuring that the latest fashions are in the store quickly. Through its point-of-sale systems and highly efficient replenishment process, low-demand products are sold very quickly by aggressively discounting them. This makes way for faster-moving products and newer fashion lines. In this way, the Gap maintains fresh, up-to-date, highly demanded styles in its stores at all times—an essential component of its positioning. In my opinion, strategic flexibility helped Gap Inc. to increase its stock from an average of $16 per share (2005 – 2010) to $45 in 2013 just before the great CEO stepped down.

It is always a learning experience to understand how different organizations work along with different management perspectives. Consider how it resonates with your experience and how the strategy applies to your workplace or your personal life so that the process should result in insightful/learning moments. Try to gain additional insights as to how different strategies and perspectives transpire in different contexts. Finally, try to learn from the conceptual evidence provided in research, organizations or other people’s lives to gain insights on how strategic phenomena resonates with your experience, and engage in insightful meaningful discussion with yourself or your peers to improve your goals and objectives as they relate to your purpose in life.

"A life without trouble and vicissitudes is a life without progress. We can make even our greatest difficulties and failures our steppingstones on the upward climb toward success.." - Paramahansa Yogananda

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