IIMK Working Paper on Reflexive Dynamics

IIM KOZHIKODE WORKING PAPERS SERIES
IIMK/WPS/74/MC/2010/13
Reflexive-Dynamics: On the Uses of the Terms
‘Strategy’ and ‘Strategic’ in Case Teaching
Shiva Kumar Srinivasan
Why is the term ‘strategic’ over-used in case teaching? What, furthermore, is
the difference between the use of the term ‘strategic’ as an adjective and the
term ‘strategy’ as a noun? How will differentiating between these terms help
to understand the pedagogical assumptions in the case method? These then
are the questions that are addressed in this perspective essay. The main
argument here is that misperceptions about the use of the term ‘strategic’
mediate not only the process of teaching via the case method, but also make it
difficult to understand the ‘economic sources of strategy’ as an academic
discipline. These misperceptions will not only lead to speculation about the
cognitive style of CEOs during case analysis, but also expect students to
understand those aspects of the functioning of top management which may
not be familiar even to the CEOs themselves. Furthermore, decision making
in strategic contexts is not as linear as it used to be in firms that are awash
with information in the knowledge-based era. It is therefore important to
appreciate how the articulation of ‘strategic intent’ by a top decision maker
can introduce a process of ‘reflexive dynamics’ that makes it difficult to
differentiate between the ‘cognitive’ and ‘manipulative’ functions of language.
It is important then to differentiate rigorously between ‘announcing’ and
‘articulating’ a strategy and not reduce the reflexive dynamics of the latter to
the former.
Introduction
The implicit assumption in case teaching is that decision-making, as
understood in the context of case analysis in the classroom, is necessarily
‘strategic’. This is however not the same as saying that a decision-making
opportunity emerged from within the strategic planning unit since the
fondness for this term cuts across various domains in complex firms. The
adjective ‘strategic’, which prefixes the term ‘strategic management’, for
instance, is not the same as the substantive noun, ‘strategy’. So not all
decisions made within a strategic planning unit in a firm are necessarily
strategic, i.e., have implications for the firm as a whole; many decisions are
simply pre-programmed, routine, or, at best, tactical. To understand the
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language of strategy then it is important to decide whether these terms are
being invoked in the form of an ‘adjective’, or in the form of a ‘noun’; and,
furthermore, on the basis of the specific organizational or classroom contexts
in which they are being deployed. There is a discursive propensity however
to over-use the word ‘strategic’ during case-teaching even when it is not
strictly required. The purpose of this working paper is to try and understand
why this is the case; and what symptomatic inferences can be made from this
simple observation about the case method of teaching in both business
schools and managerial development programs.
Perceptions of Strategy
What does the over-use of this word say not only about the latent meanings of
the word, but also about the implicit assumptions in the case method? The
habit of over-using this term is particularly endemic amongst those using the
case method. It is almost as though a case is not worth teaching if it lacked a
strategic dimension for the firm as whole; or if it did not necessarily involve
problems of strategic decision making and questions of strategic leadership.
When a strategic dimension is not overtly stated in the case, then, it is
invariably attributed to the case, by the case-instructor, or by the discussants
in the class, to give it a strategic spin; which is more or less the equivalent of
the intellectual excitement that characterizes the case method itself. This
endemic problem in case teaching gives the impression that there is
something synonymous between teaching strategy and teaching via the case
method. The underlying pedagogical anxiety, which is worked-through by
the invocation of the term ‘strategic’, is what is captured elsewhere when
executives are asked to examine whether they know what a business strategy
is; and, if they do, whether they have a strategy for their firms (Porter, 1996;
Hambrick & Fredrickson, 2001). No serious executive angling for a position of
leadership will want to say ‘no’ to this question; analogously, no case
instructor will want to work without a strategic approach to case analysis.
Being able to say ‘yes’ to this question then in the contexts of managerial
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development programs, leadership training workshops, and case-based
seminars has become a pre-requisite for being taken seriously. So, why does
this happen? This is all the more interesting since strategy, even given its
dominance in the curriculum, is not a new discipline that has to be thought-
through or worked-through with any sense of urgency. The use of this term
has less to do, I argue, with domain specificity per se than with the scope of
decision-making as such. That is why the term is invoked by those from other
functional areas even if they are not too well-disposed to strategy vis-à-vis
their own areas, especially in the context of case teaching.
Strategic Preoccupations
The articulation of the adjectival form of this term is something that most case
instructors find immensely enjoyable since they say that they ‘teach strategic
decision-making in firms’, when asked what they do in the classroom or how
they contribute to a business school. But those who are from the domain of
strategic management are more likely to say modestly that they ‘teach
strategy’. The connotations attached to these linguistic differences are quite
interesting because there is a wide-spread misperception or conflation of what
case instructors mean and what the popular perception of this term means.
The case instructor might be pre-occupied with theories of the firm, the notion
of competitive dynamics, company analysis, industry analysis, and so on, but
the set of connotations that interferes in the willingness of the case discussants
to distinguish between these terms is from the domain of inter-personal
dynamics in everyday life. The lay person’s instinctive response is that a
person who teaches strategy or works on strategy is somehow ‘shrewd’ and
knows how to look after himself, whereas other folks are naïve and struggle
to get on in competitive situations.
Strategy as Street-Smart
It therefore comes as a shock when the lay-person is told that strategic
management is not about inter-personal dynamics per se, but a form of
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applied business economics, and that while it is theoretically rooted in
business economics there is an enormous difference between being ‘strategic’
in the lay person’s sense of the term, and doing strategy or strategic
management in the academic sense of the term. But differentiating rigorously
between the technical and popular meanings of this term does not make the
misperception go away because there is a deep impression in the popular
imagination that understanding strategy in the sense of strategic management
is only a means to being or becoming strategic in everyday life. This is what
most people want since there is a high probability that most of them will not
become leaders of firms and therefore do not have to worry about the
academic demands of business economics. There is an unconscious desire to
become the professional equivalent of ‘street smart’; this is the desire that is at
stake in the idea that not everything needed to succeed in business or life can
be taught or learnt in professional schools, especially in professions like
business which cannot afford to subsidize naïveté in their dealings with clients
(McCormack, 1986; McCormack, 1990).
Strategists as ‘Subjects Presumed to Know’
So then there is a split between the technical meaning of the term and how it
is understood by the layperson. The onus then on strategy instructors is to
continually prove that they know how to analyze and navigate complex
situations of both an industrial and inter-personal type. I am not sure if this is
a fair demand on them but it is often implicit in case discussions; or while
thinking-through what is presupposed in terms of the fantasies that different
domains of management have about each other. This is analogous to the
transferential idea that analysands have that psychoanalysts have no personal
problems at all or can solve them without much effort. Analysts then are
perceived to be free of symptoms or are at least expected to be free of them;
likewise, strategy instructors are expected to be shrewd, smart, and even
street-smart in all interpersonal interactions. And, again, like psychoanalysts,
they are expected to be able to read the minds of the people that they
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encounter in everyday life. These misperceptions, needless to say, represent
huge professional burdens for both analysts and strategy instructors; hence,
the propensity to use the term ‘guru’ in the transferential sense of the term to
address or describe people working in these areas. These people are, as
psychoanalysis puts it, ‘subjects presumed to know’ not only their own desire
in a given situation, but also that of the competition as evidenced by the
routine invocation of game theory in the discourses of psychoanalysis and
strategic management (Dixit and Nalebuff, 2010). These fantasies then are
related to the underlying anxiety that there is no point in doing work in a
given domain if the insights pertinent to that domain cannot help the
individual to get what he wants, or to at least understand what sort of things
are worth pursuing from the locus of the individual decision maker or the
firm that he represents. This is the sense in which lay-people talk about the
difficulty involved in finding their way through life when they say: ‘that was
strategic, wasn’t it?’ This sort of a comment is partly a description of a
situation and partly an accusation. There is a lot of pressure to be strategic in
the context of everyday life as proof that the academic effort put into learning
the discipline of either strategy or game theory was worth the while.
Strategy as ‘State-Craft’
It is important to think-through the idiomatic uses of the terms ‘strategy’ and
‘strategic’ as carefully as possible because these are the connotations that most
MBA students and those who enroll for MDP programs carry in their heads
when they are asked to open a case discussion even if it is in a domain other
than strategy. This default program goes to the core of their being; they might
even invoke Chanakya and Machiavelli as important prototypes of this form
of strategy, which represents the notion of ‘state-craft’. In other words, the
default program in their minds is pre-occupied with a political notion of
strategy, or an interpersonal notion of strategy, rather than with a managerial
notion of strategy. This misperception serves as a mental block and makes it
difficult for students to apply the cognitive tools introduced in courses in
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business economics to strategy courses. These learnings from economics
courses also remain highly compartmentalized while students struggle to
shake-off the traditional pre-conceptions about what it means to do strategy,
and become ‘strategic’ in terms of their over-all outlook. I have personally
observed this in a number of MBA students; it therefore takes a lot of effort
before they begin to understand the rudiments of the ‘economic sources of
strategy’. What students are actually interested in are either the ‘political
sources of strategy’ (applied state-craft) or the interpersonal dynamics of
strategy with a dash of game theory, which introduces them to the idea that
their desire or options are often determined not so much by who they are and
what they are doing, but by what all the important players in a given
situation are collectively up to together (though they may not necessarily
bother to inform each other of their moves unless they can accrue some
competitive advantage by doing so). The term ‘strategic’, incidentally, is also
invoked in the context of ‘strategic-studies’, which is preoccupied with the
relationship between geo-politics, international relations, and the modalities
involved in projecting the relationship between ‘soft-power’ and ‘hard-
power’, i.e., the might represented by the culture and the armed forces of a
nation which constitutes its ability to not only get things done in its own
strategic interests, but also persuade the comity of nations of the rightness of
its cause. The combination of these forms of power, Joseph Nye argues, leads
to ‘smart power’ (Nye, Jr. 2008; 2010).
Strategy as Applied Business Economics
While such problems of semantic conflation are well-understood amongst
those working in these areas, it is not something that students have given
much thought to. So then we wind up in situations where students have a
notion of strategy that is totally unrelated to what they will encounter in the
classroom. If all strategic management courses were re-titled, for instance, as
‘Applied Business Economics’, then, student enrollment will plummet at
once. Even though the case instructors are thinking about business economics,
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theories of competitive dynamics, industrial economics, game theory, and
such cognitively-rich ‘sources’ of academic thought, the students are pre-
occupied with strategy in the context of everyday life; hence, the propensity
to suture the gap between where the students are, and where the instructor is,
through an excessive invocation of the term ‘strategic’ in the classroom. The
aim here is to harness the connotations of a term that is shot through with
both inter-personal and political meanings even in the context of applied
economics. The other reason pertains to the fact that decision-making is of
interest across the curriculum rather than specifically within the domain of
strategic management.
The Mind of the CEO
The focus on strategic decision-making is interesting then because it helps the
instructor and the class to discuss the modalities of decision-making that is
relevant at the highest possible level in the firm. But, here again, the argument
is not necessarily made from within the locus of a theory of the firm as to why
decision-making at higher levels is pedagogically more interesting if the
placement process will actually put students into entry-level jobs as trainees if
they lack previous work experience; or, at best, at middle levels through
lateral placements. The only place where decision-making at the highest
possible level is directly of relevance is in advanced management programs
but most faculty members may not themselves have sufficient understanding
of the industries in which students will be placed, or have any clue
whatsoever as to how CEOs think even in the general domain, let alone a
particular domain or firm. The idea that the cognitive patterns and leadership
styles of CEOs is worthy of study may be true, but it is something that is of
recent origin compared to the amount of time that the case method has been
around. Even the idea that CEOs might need formal training and the attempt
to set up specific programs for newly-appointed CEOs is but a recent
achievement even for Harvard Business School, which has been in the
business of offering advanced management programs for quite some time.
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We must, of course, not conflate advanced management programs with those
that target CEOs in particular given the greater specificity to the offerings in
the latter category. It is only when several batches of CEOs have graduated
from these programs and provide feedback to instructors on what their
learnings amounted to in terms of organizational challenges that it will
become possible to decipher their mind-sets with the levels of accuracy that
we presuppose is available when decision-making is routinely taught from
the top management point-of-view as in the context of the case method
(Stevens, 2001, 2002; Porter and Nohria, 2010).
Teaching Decision-Making
What does it mean to think about strategic decision-making then in such
pedagogical contexts? When students write decision essays they are forced to
speculate on what the challenges might be to think like top-management. It is
hardly their fault if they do so since even faculty are only now in the process
of finding out. There will therefore be a problem if the structure of advanced
management programs is inadvertently replicated for MBA students. While
this point is fairly obvious in terms of theory, it is usually violated in practice
because the pre-occupation with top-management makes decision-making
much more glamorous even though only a small proportion of either faculty
or students present in that classroom will have any empirical encounter with
the locus from which they discuss decision-making. Furthermore, in many
business schools and management programs, students are supposed to turn-
in decision essays only or mainly from the point of view of the chief
executive, and not from the point of view of a management consultant, since
the latter make recommendations, but do not have to take decisions on behalf
of the firm. This idea itself is an unexamined presupposition that is repeated
in classes as a form of pedagogical orthodoxy without understanding that
neither the instructor nor the students have ever had any meaningful
acquaintance with a chief executive of any domain from close quarters. There
is however a high probability that both students and instructors will have at
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least a better understanding of the consultancy process since many students
would like to become consultants. Is there not a lot more give-and-take
between academic research and the cognitive tool-kits of consultants in
knowledge-based sectors (Friga, 2009)? The macho ideology in place in MBA
programs however will not sanction this desire on the part of students
because they are supposed to do everything from the CEO’s point of view,
but it is not necessarily clear that even the CEO understands what it means to
think like a CEO, or know what exactly is the right thing to do when he or she
takes over a firm (Porter et al, 2004). The rationale for this orthodoxy is never
made clear because this is an unexamined assumption in the curriculum,
which was originally forged to develop skill-sets in the linear contexts of
firms that implicitly invoke the notion of a ‘chain-of-command’. What the
implications of such linear models of organizational design are for teaching
decision-making through the case method in knowledge-based economies is
simply not thought-through sufficiently. The invocation of an unexamined
notion of the term ‘strategic’ to link the different levels of interest in courses in
economics, with those which are more applied in business policy and
strategic management, then, is a part of the same pedagogical process. Here
the original rationale for a particular modality has been long forgotten, but
can be uncovered with some effort.
Strategy in the Knowledge-based Era
What does it mean then to invoke the term strategy or strategic in a
knowledge-based era, where firms are characterized by rapid information and
knowledge flows that have to be factored into decision-making? The models
of decision-making taught in Indian MBA programs presuppose a firm where
information flows are modest at best, or filtered through ‘proper channels’, on
its way to the top-management; this is however not the case anymore. In the
traditional industrial model of organization, the CEO was haunted by forms
of strategic uncertainty that were related to having too-little information to
process as a prelude to decision making. In the post-industrial model of
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decision-making, the CEO has to handle the challenge created by the process
of having to crunch too-much information. There is not only an ‘uncertainty-
problem’ in both the models; the causes and implications of the uncertainty
are not the same. So while we pay homage to a knowledge-economy in the
context of information technology and knowledge-based forms of industry in
the curriculum, we have not sufficiently incorporated the challenge posed by
the explosion of information to both strategy formulation and implementation
(Evans and Wurster, 1999). While there is a huge cost-factor to crunching
information; there is also a cost-factor in refusing to crunch the information
(Davenport et al, 2010). In either case, a firm must understand what challenges
the era of information and knowledge pose to the traditional model of
decision-making that is derived from the modalities of decision-making in the
aftermath of the industrial revolution (Porter and Millar, 1985).
Cognitive Tools for Consultancy
Developing the skill-sets that characterize consultants such as those related to
processing information, and developing knowledge-based practices, along
with the deployment of new cognitive tools and metrics, has become much
more important to CEOs than ever before. So while MBA programs may be
more interested in the machismo of the traditional firm, CEOs and executives
are desperately in need of new skill-sets. These are to be found, interestingly
enough, in the portfolio of skill-sets that characterize consultants who also
have a preoccupation with research, and with applying the metrics and
cognitive tools developed elsewhere. D’Aveni, of the Tuck School of Business,
for instance, has an interesting example of how the cognitive tools that he
developed for doing a ‘price-benefit analysis’ to prevent commoditization in
hypercompetitive markets were not only applied rigorously, but taken even
further by strategy consultants while helping out their clients (D’Aveni, 2010).
Persisting therefore with antiquated models of decision-making that used to
constitute the lot of CEOs in stable but closed economies before the advent of
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globalization and liberalization is therefore an atavistic approach to teaching
decision-making in management programs.
On Articulating Strategic Intent
Appreciating the breakthroughs of the knowledge economy is not only about
being interested in these domains per se, but in understanding how these
domains have affected our default programs (including those areas that are
most strongly linked to the industrial revolution like strategy and operations
management). We also have to ask how the default modalities in the
invocation of the terms ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’ are affected by the problems
of articulating strategy, in addition to the usual set of problems that are
discussed in the context of strategic formulation and implementation. The
discussion of these terms in this essay is motivated not only by the fact that it
is interesting from a cultural, communication, and linguistic point of view,
but also from the fact that, in addition to being formulated and implemented,
strategies have to be articulated forcefully or implemented quietly. Since
regulatory requirements have decreased the possibility of doing things
quietly, it is worth considering the problems associated with the articulation
of strategy as itself worthy of examination; strategists, in fact, have started to
do so in order to clarify the problem of ‘strategic intent’ (Hamel and Prahalad,
1989); the relationship between the articulation of strategic theory and the
expectations that it engenders amongst its practitioners (Ghoshal, 2005); by
theoretically informed hedge-fund managers under the aegis of ‘reflexivity’
(Kaufman, 2003; Soros, 2008; Soros, 2010), and the socio-economic dynamics
that ensues through the formation of expectations that are communicated in
the stock markets, the macroeconomic environment, and even in the context
of central banking (Moss, 2007; Bernanke, 2007; Ahmed, 2009).
Strategy, Speech, and Secrecy
The argument here is that in a knowledge-based era, the articulation of
strategy will begin to ‘retroactively’ affect both its initial formulation and its
subsequent implementation in firms. The communication of strategy in the
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context of policy making is itself therefore a form of strategic communication.
There are compelling reasons for this, which link the notions of strategy,
speech, and secrecy in all the areas mentioned above. This is because business
policy, fiscal policy, and monetary policy all suffer from the problem of
reflexivity in the context of the actual articulation of the policy itself. Hence,
the tradition of secrecy that haunted policy formulation in these areas for a
number of years before the new- found emphasis on accountability and
transparency began to change the relationship between the articulation of
policy, and the need to develop financial literacy in the context of both
deregulation and the recent financial crisis. Amongst the voluminous reams
of information that decision-makers in the strategy domains have to crunch
then is competitive intelligence in the context of game theory to understand
how the competition will respond to the articulation of any given strategy.
Cognitive and Manipulative Functions
What, to ask a simple question, is the impact of articulating a strategy to
stakeholders as opposed to not announcing it publicly? Will being honest
about the formulation of a strategy affect a firm’s ability to implement the
strategy either internally or externally? What is the relationship between
articulating (and not just formulating) strategy and strategic imitation? How
will the competitive dynamics in a given industry be affected when a firm
boldly goes public and communicates its strategy? Will the communication be
seen as an objective representation of the strategy? Or will it, by being
articulated, change the underlying dynamics because the firm has taken the
trouble to formalize its ‘strategic intent’, which it could have been secretive
about in the hope that the task of formalization can be left to the academics,
the competition, and the media? What is the contradiction, if any, between the
demands to articulate a position vis-à-vis the relevant stakeholders and the
ability of the competition to now pre-empt the public disclosure of strategy by
making strategic moves? In post-industrial societies that are subject to the
rapid flows of information, knowledge, and skill-sets, the notion of
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competitive dynamics must be understood then through a set of ‘reflexive-
dynamics’, which must not conflate the difference between the ‘cognitive
function’ and the ‘manipulative function’ of language (Soros, 2010). The
competitive structure in any given industry or sector will change through the
mere process of publicly articulating a strategy by a dominant player in that
sector. The mere articulation of a ‘strategic intent’ by a firm then will have to
be taken seriously by the competition; firms don’t have the time anymore to
wait and see what will happen to determine whether the competition is
serious about what it has publicly announced as its strategic intent. Neither
strategy nor strategic communication is what it used to be in the simple
dimension of the cognitive, which is either linear or invokes the inter-
subjective phenomena that are dear to game theorists albeit without the
complications introduced by language which shapes the desires of firms or
individual actors. It was actually in psychoanalytic theory that there was an
attempt to formalize the relationship between desire, language, and
temporality (Lacan, 1988; Forrester, 1991; Fink, 1996).
Conclusion
Strategic communication then is not reducible anymore to announcing a
strategy; it has become synonymous with articulating a strategy. This process
necessarily involves trying to anticipate the ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’
consequences of an act of communication in the public domain by triggering
off a process of ‘reflexive dynamics’; which will then mediate the traditional
notion of competitive dynamics. So, for instance, in the industrial era, the
announcement of a strategy or any important public disclosure by a firm
would not lead to immediate volatility; instead it would lead to, or was at
least perceived to lead to, long-term stability. In the post-industrial era,
however, the articulation of a strategy, especially in the public domain, often
leads to volatility in the immediate term, and nobody knows exactly what in
the long term because strategic intent has become as important as the
formulation and execution of strategy. What the medium and long-term
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relationship will be between the formal articulation of a strategic intent (to
expand operations, for instance) and the behavior of competing firms is
anybody’s guess.
Whatever the answer to these questions might be (given that they are too
empirical to be examined beyond this point in this working paper), the notion
of strategic communication will have to be re-thought as well in a continuum
of concerns including the default programs for the following terms: strategy,
strategic, and strategic-communication in terms of the varied intellectual
sources from which they are drawn, and the myriad uses to which they have
been put so far in management education. Working-through this default set of
connotations theoretically is necessary so that we can invoke a new range of
meanings in the context of the theory and practice of strategy. The case
method then will have to incorporate the need to debrief participants in case
discussions sufficiently to make this possible in order to renew the modalities
involved in teaching decision-making (whether or not it, in fact, has strategic
import for the fortunes of the firm).
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