Strategy: empirical evidence

Strategy: empirical evidence

A study at Nottingham Business School has examined the enormous field of management literature for evidence of what, amongst all of the assertion and prescription, actually seems to work. The following are ten headings, under which are grouped relevant ideas. The weight to be put on human resouce management is evident. It is also the case the uniform prescriptions are not enough: one has to satisfy markets and regulators, staff and customers and also, whilst appeasing these stakeholders, continually improve and become distinctive. The two key prescriptions seem to be:

• Know yourself, and know your operating environment
• Adapt yourself to your circumstances, whilst maintaining and enhancing your distinctiveness

As an organisation's circumstances will surely vary with geography and with any given stakeholder interaction, so the suite of reponses which you offer must be both differentiated; yet, in some way, must remain internally harmonious. To achieve this is difficult. It is nescessary to innovate and to change, but it is also necessary to maintain a unity. This demands that the talents throughout the organisation (as well as those outside of it) are harnessed into a "superorganism". We have yet to learn how to do this well, or as is often the case, at all.

Change and learning

Successful organisations in the 21st Century focus on the ability to do things differently in ways which cannot easily be imitated by competitors. Products and services need to be reinvented continuously. Traditional organisational structures and cultures cannot deliver this.

• Clear development strategies are the best driver for change, combining long-term vision and short-term contingency.
• Flexibility, cost effectiveness, reliability and customer care are just entrance factors and do not guarantee success.
• Sustainability is increasingly equated with the speed at which organisations can translate the tacit knowledge and creativity of employees at all levels into new products and services.
• Enhanced productivity is increasingly about speeding up the rate of innovation, not just doing more for less.
• Customer focus makes change inevitable, continuous and directed.
• Flexibility and willingness to change must be deeply embedded in organisational culture.
• Globalisation is a resource for change, not a threat.

Workplace partnership and employee involvement is critical for effective and sustainable change.

• Failure to ensure employee 'ownership' of change is a major source of underachievement and innovation decay.
• A formal and effective commitment to management-workforce partnership is a powerful resource for innovation and development throughout the organisation.
• Partnership is not another management fad but a framework for animating and driving innovation.

Need for a goal oriented approach.

• Direct involvement of employees in the redesign of organisational structures and jobs is more expensive in the short term, but more effective and sustainable.
• Employees increasingly expect rewarding work and a high quality of working life, including the day-to-day ability to influence their own jobs.
• A 'bottom-up' approach to change needs careful preparation, using effective tools to promote dialogue and trust.
• New ways of working need new forms of reward and remuneration, including gainsharing.
• Gain-sharing generates organisational versatility and a culture of innovation.
• Win-win solutions are both effective and sustainable.

Building the team-based organisation.

• Are 'teams' now a meaningless concept?
• From basic teams to extended teams to involved teams.
• Workload and targets become negotiable.
• Team-based principles are needed throughout the whole organisation.
• Ad hoc teams are a resource for problem solving and innovation.
• Establish responsive knowledge systems (not knowledge management) to enable self-management of knowledge.
• Reform traditional remuneration systems. Rethink the role of middle management and supervisors.

Creative working environments combine increased competitiveness and quality of working life.

• Jobs for life are dead. The key task for employers is to find a new basis on which to persuade employees to share their full range of talents and knowledge.
• Creative and empowering workplace environments enable employers to gain the full benefit of employee's knowledge, competence and innovative potential while increasing opportunities for individual fulfilment.
• Creativity and innovation cannot just be learnt as an individual competence: they are the product of how people are able to interact in the working environment.
• Lean, cost-driven organisations are not innovative organisations: people need slack to be creative together.
• Quality of working life is a competitive advantage.

Investment in training and development.

• New forms of work organisation maximise the returns on investment in training and workforce development.
• There is a strong link between success of new forms of work organisation and investment in workforce development.
• Greater emphasis is needed on core competencies such as communication and problem-solving.

Technology as a factor in facilitating change.

• New forms of work organisation maximise the returns on investment in technology.
• Information technologies can (but don't always) reinforce communication and empowerment.
• The design of technology often makes assumptions about work organisation. This is sometimes unhelpful.
• Workforce participation in the design and implementation of new technology leads to mutual gains.

No effective change without senior management commitment.

• Management values and attitudes deeply affect the nature and effectiveness of the change process.
• The introduction of workplace partnership and new forms of work organisation is as much an investment as the introduction of new buildings or equipment.
• 'Organisational culture is defined by the things of which managers approve or disapprove'.
• Front-line managers can't be allowed to avoid responsibility for organisational development by hiding behind HR.
• Set-backs are inevitable: anticipate them and hold your nerve.
• Real change is more difficult than you expect.

Learning for change.

• There are plenty of recipe books, but they don't work.
• The task is not to try and catch up with 'best practice', but to innovate by learning from validated practice.
• European diversity is a learning resource.
• The learning organisation is good at networking; it is close to all its stakeholders; it accumulates, distributes and uses knowledge effectively; and it proactively manages the value chain.
• Employees involved in change at all levels need to acquire research skills in order to identify, analyse and appraise lessons from other organisations, and to evaluate progress on a continuous basis.
• Networks generate knowledge and facilitate peer support.
• Successful change always involves painstaking research, negotiation, experimentation, critical appraisal and redesign over many cycles.

Continuous improvement.

• Partnership and work organisation are reflective processes: there is no end state.
• Continuous improvement needs to be a central part of the culture.
• Continual appraisal of research into evidence-based practice is a stimulus for improvement.

The wider picture.

• Organisations do not exist in a vacuum.
• Co-operation with public policy makers, business support organisations and universities to resource change.
• Celebrate and exploit Europe's distinctive public assets.