Evaluate the suitability of the emergent and intended approaches to strategic management for Tesco
One of the world’s largest retailers operating in 12 different countries and with over 500,000 employees is Tesco PLC (Tesco, 2014). Tesco’s states their strategic priorities as to continue their investment in the strong UK businesses, establish a multichannel leadership and to pursue disciplined international growth (Tesco, 2014). In any company, strategy plays a key part in its success or failure and can be split into two types; intended and emergent. An intended approach is described as “a planned strategy designed at a senior level of management for the implementation at other organisational levels” (Witcher & Chau, 2014). Whereas the
In 1993 and 1994 Tesco kicked off their phase of international expansion into France, China, Korea and Turkey with the acquisition of Catteau and Hungary's S-Market (Butler & Kollewe, 2014). This can be seen as an intended strategy due it being part of their strategic priorities on their website, the seriousness of such a big decision and for some instances they did not look at the external environment when considering this strategy. For example their first move with the acquisition of Catteau in France was sold off after four years as they struggled to compete with the bigger rivals and discounters (Butler & Kollewe, 2014).
Intended strategies can be supported by Porter’s frameworks of Generic strategies and five-forces. Argyres and McGahan state “Porters frameworks for analyzing industries and competitive positioning brought a new level of discipline and rigor to the field” (Argyres & McGahan, 2002). Therefore emphasizing the importance of planning, Porter believes his five- forces analysis is very useful in 999 out of 1000 cases, and the essence of most good strategies is the need to make many choices that are all consistent and therefore companies cannot randomly make a lot of consistent choices (Argyres & McGahan, 2002). However Moore suggests that Porter’s ideas worked well in the 80’s and 90’s, and are still relevant