The Configuration
School
Strategy Formation as a Process of
Transformation
Presented by: Alicia Burns
Strategic Management
12/02/14

Agenda
• Introduction
• Basis of Strategic Management
• Recap of the other 9 Schools
• Main Idea of Configuration School
• Premises of School
• Transforming Organizations
• Fueling the Transformation Engine
• Bottom-Up Change
• Top-Down Transformation
• Criticism
• Wrap and Closing

Strategic Management
Defined

▫Art & science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating, cross-functional decisions that enable an organization to achieve its objectives.

Steps in Strategic
Management

Where TEN
Schools of Thought are thoroughly examined to apply
STRATEGY
http://ispatguru.com/strategic-management/

Strategy Formulation

Key Strategic Management Questions
• What kind of business should we become?
• Are we in the right fields • Are there new competitors • What strategies should we pursue?
• How are our customers changing?

Look Back at Other 9 Schools
1. Design School

Sees SF as a process of conception

2. Planning School

Sees SF as a formal process

3. Positioning School

Sees SF an analytical process

4. Entrepreneurial School

Sees SF as a visionary

process
5. Cognitive School

Sees SF as a mental process

6. Learning School

Sees SF as an emergent process

7. Power School

Sees SF as a process of

negotiation
8. Cultural School
9. Environmental School

Sees SF as a collective process
Sees SF as a reactive process

Strategy Formation as a Single Process

Strategy Formation as Many Process

Question: What do you think
Are these schools different approaches to strategy formation
OR
Different parts of the same process?

Main Ideas of Configuration
School
• Strategy is about continuity, not change (Must do both)
• Strategy is about creating stability and about the ability to occasionally dramatically change
• Configuration- academics
• Transformation- practiced by managers and prescribed by consultants
• Differs in one fundamental respect: it offers the possibility of reconciliation, one way to integrate the messages of the other schools.

Main Ideas of Configuration
School
• Offers the possibility of reconciliation, one way to integrate the messages of the other schools.
• Among the type of stages within an organization we find:
• Stage
• Stage
• Stage
• Stage
• Stage

of development of stability of adaptation of struggle of revolution

Premises of the Configuration
School
• An organization can be described in terms of some kind of stable configuration of its characteristics • Periods of stability are interrupted occasionally by some processes of transformation- a quantum leap to another configuration
• The key to strategic management, therefore, is to sustain stability or at least adaptable strategic change most of the time

Transforming Organizations
• Incremental Change
• Quantum Change
• Planned Change
• Driven Change
• Evolved Change

Question

Do you think Change
Management is an oxymoron?

Quote from Book
“Change can’t be managed.
Change can be ignored, resisted, responded to, capitalized upon, and created. But it can’t be managed and made to march to some orderly step-by-step process…” Fueling the Transformation
Engine

• Just as a car won’t move without its engine, so too a combination of energy and ideas is crucial if an organization is to undergo sustained