Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action

by Robert C. H. Chia , Robin Holt

• ISBN13: 9780521895507
• ISBN10: 0521895502
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Strategy exhibits a pervasive commitment to the belief that the best approach to adopt in dealing with affairs of the world is to confront, overcome and subjugate things to conform to our will, control and eventual mastery. Performance is about sustaining distinctiveness. This direct and deliberate approach draws inspiration from ancient Greek roots and has become orthodoxy. Yet there are downsides. This book shows why. Using examples from the world of business, economics, military strategy, politics and philosophy, it argues that success may inadvertently emerge from the everyday coping actions of a multitude of individuals, none of whom intended to contribute to any preconceived design. A consequence of this claim is that a paradox exists in strategic interventions, one that no strategist can afford to ignore. The more single-mindedly a strategic goal is sought, the more likely such calculated instrumental action eventually works to undermine its own initial success.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Reaching for the ground	p. 1
The dangers of deliberate planning	p. 1
Take care of the penniesà: strategy from the 'bottom up'	p. 10
Strategy through self-cultivation	p. 12
The limits of designed strategic intervention	p. 16
The word is not nice	p. 20
Rediscovering strategy without design	p. 22
Spontaneous order: the roots of strategy emergence	p. 25
Heraclitus, Lao Tzu and the ever-changing world order	p. 29
The Scottish Enlightenment	p. 31
Bastiat and the seen/unseen orders	p. 35
Carl Menger and the phenomenon of money	p. 38
Friedrich Hayek and 'spontaneous order'	p. 39
Open source	p. 47
Complexity, emergence and self-organization	p. 51
Economic agency and steps to ecological awareness	p. 57
The observer and the observed	p. 59
Agency and methodological individualism	p. 60
Entitative thinking and the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'	p. 64
Economic agency	p. 68
The dangers of decontextualized thinking	p. 73
The credit crisis, 2008	p. 79
The case of UBS	p. 83
Towards 'system wisdom'	p. 88
Reconceptualizing agency, self-interest and purposive action	p. 91
Human agency revisited	p. 96
True and false individualism	p. 99
Forms of knowledge: episteme, technē and phronesis	p. 105
From purposeful to purposive action	p. 108
The 'practice turn' in strategy research	p. 112
Henri Bergson and intuition	p. 113
Duration, process and creativity	p. 115
Process and practice in strategy research	p. 118
Weak individualism and the primacy of social practices	p. 122
The practice turn and the documenting of strategy-in-practice	p. 129
Building and dwelling: two ways of understanding strategy	p. 134
Building and dwelling	p. 139
Engaging with the world	p. 139
Dwelling and the Gothic sensibility	p. 143
Heidegger revisited	p. 150
Expressing thought	p. 154
Strategy as 'wayfinding'	p. 159
Strategic positioning and navigation	p. 160
Knowing as we go: mapping, map-making and map-using	p. 164
The Phillips machine	p. 168
The active nature of perception	p. 170
Graeme Obree: the case of a bricoleur	p. 173
Wayfinding the Google way	p. 179
The silent efficacy of indirect action	p. 186
Direct and indirect approaches to strategy	p. 186
The downsides of spectacular strategic interventions	p. 190
Mētis as spontaneous indirect action	p. 192
The strategy of indirectness	p. 197
Towards a strategic blandness	p. 201
Epilogue: Negative capability	p. 209
Notes	p. 213
Index	p. 243
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