Strategic Management

This chapter examines the development of strategic management practices from the late 1970s. Strategic management advanced on the prior practices of strategic planning by emphasizing change and implementation. It also opened up the strategy process by decentralizing responsibilities and including employees in implementation. Strategic management’s rise was supported by three exogenous forces: growing pressure on big organizations to change, a new managerial culture of responsibility and learning, and new communication and participation technologies. Nevertheless, strategic planning’s development still took two kinds of arduous and fallible institutional work: ‘rule-making’ and ‘resource-organizing’. Under the first, Shell for example developed a version of strategic management as involving managerial conversation and learning, while McKinsey promoted strategic management as involving decentralization. Under the second, new consulting firms such as Gemini were created and large corporate investments in management training were made, as at General Electric’s Crotonville facility.