Saturday
Oct 11th
| Growth without manpower - the secret of success |
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| Written by Professor Peter Wyer | ||||||
Page 2 of 4 The Particular Difficulty of Managing Long-term Development The small business management task of relating effectively to its external operating environment so as to identify and seize development opportunities and/or recognise potential development constraints is particularly problematic for many owner managers. A continuing tendency within many academic and ‘how to’ texts is to encourage the owner manager to attempt to undertake a tidy, step management process involving (a) undertaking a comprehensive external audit (reveal opportunities and threats); (b) assessment of internal organisation strengths and weaknesses; (c) undertaking of a SWOT analysis; (d) identification of long-term objectives and future pre-determined strategic development path(s); (e) planning of activities to facilitate implementation of identified development; (f) implementation; and (g) control and review. It can be argued, however, that the nature of the small businesses contemporary operating environment is so highly uncertain that such rational, tidy step strategic planning processes are inappropriate management vehicles for the small business. A combination of resource, time and ability constraints and the unpredictable and unknowable nature of external change situations contrive to render tidy management processes unworkable. Instead, many successful owner managers appear to ‘learn their organisations along’ in terms of identifying and acting upon new market and/or product development opportunities. Understanding of such small business ‘strategic learning processes’ is only recently beginning to emerge. For example, early stages qualitative investigation as to how small-medium sized businesses learn to effectively interact with their external operating environment has provided the following preliminary insight as to the kind of management actions and practices which make up small business ‘strategic management’ (Wyer and Mason 1998): a.Regular interaction by the owner manager with key actors and informants in the firm’s external environment (such as suppliers, distributors, customers and even competitors) - this providing insight into a ‘slice’ of the firms change environment. (a comprehensive structured external analysis being precluded by resource, time and ability constraints). b.For some owner-managers, such interaction with key informants was considered to be one part of a discovery process in which the dialogical input of others external to the firm provides insight for the small business, offering alternative ‘worldviews’ (perspectives) of a change situation for consideration by the small business decision makers. c.This externally derived information is then subjected to further internal dialogue in an attempt to contextualise the information into a form that could guide future internal change action in the small business – such as adjustment to existing markets, products and/or processes activities. d.Often, a lengthy process of to-ing and fro-ing over time between external key informant and owner manager/key internal decision makers was necessary to gain collective agreement and confidence as to the implications of the change situation under consideration and to clarify an emerging idea. e.The created information was developed into a collective understanding and built into an existing owner manager mental framework of strategic activity in terms of where the owner management currently considered the business would be in a few years time. That is, if the new understanding revealed opportunity or threat, the firms were prepared to take action in terms of adjustment to markets, products and/or processes to underpin enhanced competitiveness and development of the business. f.The clear mental framework in the form of a mental qualitative, and yet flexible ‘preferred end’ precludes written long-term plans. The insight derived out of the discovery process may have been opportunistic or accidental with the resultant idea for change being implemented on an experimental basis - in which case the resultant strategy is emergent, building out of piece-by-piece trial and error. |
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