I gave an opening speech today at a breakfast meeting for communication professionals at the Helsinki School of Economics. It was a pleasant invitation as I had not had interactions with many of the companies who were represented and have had too few dealings with the HSE, which is a well-reputed school just across the street.

I was confronted with a group of experienced and inquisitive senior communication officials and researcher colleagues. Answering their challenging questions proved to be a highly pleasurable ordeal. I had prepared a speech on the development and historical debates within the strategic management discipline. I chose to focus on particular dissident thinkers who have caused revolutions within the strategic management discipline.

Key dissidents within strategic management

Strategic management was born as a business discipline in the 1960s. Management teachers in the U.S. had become more and more aware of the role the changing business environment has in the practice of management. Many attribute the birth of the discipline of strategic management to Harvard, and more specifically its course on general managers.

Indeed, it is striking how the early texts from the discipline such as Business Policy: Texts and Cases by Learned, Cristensen, Andrews and Guth, and Concept of Corporate Strategy by Andrews are focused on teaching strategy. These early authors, who are often labeled as the Business Policy authors were indeed concerned with the holistic development of their students as strategists. Andrews (1971: 238) indeed wrote that

"Corporate purposes are by definition a projection in part of the leader’s own personal goals and a reflection of his character […] a corporation is essentially the lengthened shadow of a man.”

The Business Policy authors were also leaning towards what is known as the planning school (apparently Mintzberg's term) in strategic management. Strategy was regarded as a future-oriented business, where strategic choices lead to objectives, to be implemented with the use of various plans. While this view is often associated closest with Igor Ansoff, Learned et al. (1969: 15) also defined strategy as :

"the pattern of objectives, purposes, or goals and major policies and plans for achieving these goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is to be."

Dissident 1. Michael Porter - Strategy as an instrument

The first revolution in strategic management was caused by Michael Porter, a graduate from Harvard Business School who gained a PhD from Harvard in Economics, was successful in applying rigorous techniques from the field of microeconomics to the study and teaching of strategic management. In the a new introduction to his first milestone Competitive Strategy (Porter, 1980: x), he reflects upon the success of the book:

“This book filled a void in management thinking. After several decades of development, the role of general managers versus specialists was becoming better defined. Strategic planning had become widely accepted as the important task of charting a long-term direction for an enterprise. Early thinkers such as Kenneth Andrews and C. Roland Christensen had raised some important questions in developing a strategy [...] Yet, there were no systematic, rigorous tools for answering these questions – assessing a company’s industry, understanding competitors, and choosing a competitive position.”

Andrews and Christensen had become "early thinkers" in their approach to strategy, and Porter's powerful view started to atttract followers. Eventually, the focus started to shift away from understanding the strategists to understanding and employing strategy instruments.

Dissident 2. Henry Mintzberg - Strategy as a process

It is open to debate whether Henry Mintzberg is the founder of the strategy process school, but he probably is the most widely known. Where Michael Porter managed to switch focus away from the strategists, Mintzberg attacked the early authors', most notably Igor Ansoffs view of strategy as a premeditated plan. In a famous figure (below) in his 1977 article, Mintzberg reminded us that we understand little of strategy if we focus merely on what companies intend in their strategies, without understanding what they do.

Mintzberg's work on strategy-as-process, as well as Porter's, has fundamentally affected organizational practice as well as management studies.

Dissident(s) 3. David Knights and Glenn Morgan - Strategy as a discourse

In 1991, David Knights and Glenn Morgan published a paper in Organization Studies, where they studied strategy in a funny way. Instead of looking at strategy content or process as organizational phenomena, they took the whole discipline of strategic management under the looking glass. They conducted a foucauldian geneology on the discipline, and focused on the way strategic management constructs top managers.

Knights and Morgan's paper was revolutionary in at least two respects:

1. Through its research setting it critically examined the dogma that strategy work in some form is necessary for companies. That is, it showed the boundaries of the strategy concept in management, which had become almost overwhelming.

2. It questioned the power of top managers as craftsmen of strategy, the key premise in the Business Policy tradition. Instead, they demonstrated in an uncomfortably convicing way how the opposite is true: the strategy discipline constructs the managers.

Dissident(s) 4. David Barry and Michael Elmes - Strategy as fiction

In a way, Barry & Elmes's paper "Strategy Retold" in the Academy of Management Review in 1997 about strategy as a narrative returns the focus to a core aspect of the early planning school: viewing strategy as a text. When we look at strategy as a plan, our focus is on formulations of that plan in various documents.

There is a twist, however. Barry and Elmes treat strategy as a form of fiction and use a number of methods from literary studies to make sense of strategy as a fictional narrative.

Another key point of departure from the planning school is that Barry and Elmes also treat an organizational narrative as a polytonal form of fiction, social and shared, as well as written text. The notion of polytonality is a powerful notion in organizational strategy practice, as well as it is novel in strategy literature.

Dissident 5. Richard Whittington - Strategy as work

In 1996 Richard Whittington published a short paper in Long Range Planning, where he promoted a novel view on strategy, which he called strategy as practice.. The paper was intended for opening a discussion on a new approach for studying strategy: "The focus of this approach is on strategy as a social 'practice', on how the practitioners of strategy really act and interact." (Whittington, 1996: 731).

The discussion grew in conferences and workshops. Many well-established senior scholars joined in, followed by a number of junior scholars. Strategy-as-practice has established itself as an open discipline, with a variety of theoretical and methodological viewpoints. Although the discussion is rather diverse, the shared focus remains on understanding strategy as something that real people do in real organizations. I like to think of it as a rain dance of a sort, and us scholars as anthropologists, seeking to understand the ways and local reasons why it is performed.

Concluding reflections

I think this story has a practical dimension. The views, promomoted by the dissidents are part of the implicit, often conflicting cognitive background of strategy practice in organizations. Becoming aware of the tensions that exist in he background assumptions regarding strategy is helpful, as it enables one to be more reflexive in one's practice.

I have used a number of important scholars to plot out one possible interpretation of what has happened within the discourse of strategic management. Why these scholars were chosen over others is determined by my personal interpretation and does not represent a particularly authoritative view. Indeed, within the strategy-as-practice community there exist a number of theoretical and methodological leaders who have made the community what it is today. Furthermore, all seven of my "dissidents" are white males. I have sought to include voices which some may regard controversial or even "marginal" (I doubt Knights and Morgan, 1991 is a part of the staregy readings at Harvard Business School - correct me if I'm wrong), yet the men themselves do not seem to represent particularly marginal groups. I can only claim that this is the characteristic of the discipline itself, not a failure in my perception.

Lure of the mechanical watch

During each summer, I tend to find a new hobby or an interest. These hobbies are often things I've never done before. Around ten years ago, when Outi had just graduated and got a job as a doctor at a clinic near our summer cottage in Ilomantsi, I spent quite a few weeks learning the basics of jazz theory. I literally spent six hours a day, working through the basic modes, linking them to chords and coming up with exercises on guitar. A few summers later, I got my head around amateur astronomy and tried to learn all the constellations in the northern sky (I had much less success there; I still remember the scales and modes on guitar). Then marathons. A couple of summers later it was landscape photography, inspired by a trip to Scotland with my friend Mikko who happened to have an issue of Photography Monthly with him. The next summer I was learning about chess. Last summer it was soccer - small wonder since it was the world championship year.


I realized such a pattern exists during summer holiday only recently. It appears that even if I often don't get very far with any particular topic, the whole process is extremely relaxing. It is as if building a completely new cognitive domain helps me to forget all the problems at work and "wipe the slate clean", so to speak.

The reason I realized this only now is that my interests have always made sense somehow before (well, excluding soccer of course). This summer, however, I have been fanatically finding my way around mechanical watches. The whole thing started as I had grown increasingly irritated about having to check the time on my cell phone, which has an irritating screen saver. Anyway, I started thinking that maybe it would be cool to have a cool watch and there I was. I've bought 4 books and a number of magazine issues (yes, indeed such magazines exist) thus far. I've ordered a mass of catalogues from a number of key brands.

It's not that surprising that I would find watches compelling, really. After all, watches represent pretty much what mankind has learned about mechanics to date. They are mechanical masterpieces and small works of art at the same time. What I find particularly compelling, however are the firms that make them.

Mechanical watch brands are precious things. The products cost a whole lot of money (there is no reasonable limit, really), and their consumers mostly do not understand the intricacies involved in their making. Yet the credibility of the brands is hard earned. We want to see in a quality watch brand a consummate passion for the practice of the art of watchmaking. To use MacIntyre's term, we want to see a brand watch as a product of internal practice (a practice practiced for its own sake) and not an external one (a practice practiced for accomplishing some other good extrinsic to the practice itself, money, for instance).

In the seventies, a plague, known as the "quartz revolution" rocked the fabled halls of mechanical watchmaking. Many quality brands got into financial troubles as quartz watches took their markets. Most of the companies changed owners. Some of them survived without major upheavals, some did less well.

Nowadays, the mechanical watch is yet again the pinnacle of creation. Companies seek to build their brands by trying to show an uninterrupted path of consummate practice lasting at least a hundred years. However, unlike the wine business, the families who founded the companies rarely own them any more. Some of the most respected companies had to rebuild their production after the seventies with the help of external investments.

The key to brand credibility here appears to be identity. Are the companies really the same as when they started out. Identity means sameness, and in the case of personal or organizational identity, this sameness means continuity over time. My identity involves a 10-year old me being the same person than me now, even if I am radically different person both physically and psychologically. The key question with watch companies is: are they the same, even if they had to rebuild their production, or if they had to change personnel altogether?

One interesting example is Breguet, a classical brand if any. The company invented the first wristwatch (yes, it appears that the watch in Pulp Fiction was indeed a Breguet). Its founder is regarded as maybe the greatest genius among watchmakers. Yet, in the seventies they were purchased by a non-interested investor and they fell into oblivion, until a heavy investment from the Swatch Group got them to their feet again. One arrogant jeweler noted that Breguet is "a brand in a ventilator".

This same jeweler also noted that a true aficionado could never buy a watch from a brand that did not manufacture its own movements. Actually, relatively few do nowadays - even Rolex only started doing this in the 2000's. This is another aspect of a precious brand: authenticity. It does not suffice to design great faces and cases, use reliable subcontractors and build a brand, as this would be external, not internal practice.

Another key aspect is exclusiveness. Among watchlovers and experts, Patek Philippe appears to be widely respected as the top brand in terms of technical finesse and style. However, as this reputation has spread outside the watchlover-discourse, for some this appears to take something away from the brand. Indeed, some people buy Pateks just because they are rich and want a good watch without really appreciating what they get (or so one might suspect). This has indeed happened with Rolex, which somebody said "is much better than its reputation".

In any case, I have enjoyed this most recent excursion. Below are pictures of watches I find cool at this moment.

Jaeger-Lecoultre: Reverso Grande



IWC: Da Vinci




Audemars Piguet: Royal Oak




Breguet: Marine

Autumn in the Air

My friend and co-composer Krisse is leaving for England and we were in a bar yesterday evening. The night was a success, because the morning after was characterized - not by a sense of gloom and desperation - but by quiet, aesthetic appreciation for my immediate surroundings (Outi let me sleep until 0930). As I was pushing Iivari's cart around to help him sleep, I was struck by the color of the leaves.

There was a break in the cloud barrier and I rushed inside for my Nikon. I managed to get a few snapshots in the warm autumn light.

The contrast between the mood at work and in the surrounding nature is striking: how we buzz about in our work activities while the nature around portrays such solemn grace.

The pictures have been piling up during summer. I plan to complete a retrospective account soon. I hope that I remember some of the reflections as well.