Business Commons^™

Questioning The Epistemic Virtue Of Strategy: The Emperor Has No Clothes!, Steven French, Alexander Kouzmin, Stephen Kelly

Adjunct Professor Stephen J Kelly

A critical analysis of contemporary strategic management theory and practice suggests that modernist, linear thinking has facilitated the development of an abstracted reality which is misleading to managers and fundamentally flawed. It is argued that formulaic strategic tools such as those propounded by Porter fail to capture the reality of the complex environments that confront firms and falsely suggest that an answer can be derived from a predetermined toolbox. As an alternative to this dominant paradigm, the complexity of markets is presented not as something to be feared and ignored, but rather as a truth to be embraced. As a …