Jay Barney Trish Gorman Clifford What I Didn’t Learn in Business School How Strategy Works in the Real World Harvard Business Review Press 2010

236 Pages·2010·1.23 MB·English

by  Jay Barney Trish Gorman Clifford

Copyright
Copyright 2010 Harvard Business Review Press
All rights reserved
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in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.
First eBook Edition: October 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4221-5763-3
Jay B. Barney:
This book is dedicated to my wife, Kim; our children, Lindsay, Kristian, and
Erin; their spouses, Ryan, Amy, and Dave; and most of all, to our eight
grandchildren, Isaac, Dylanie, Audrey, Chloe, Lucas, Lincoln, Royal, and
Nolan. They help me remember that no success can compensate for failure in
the home.
Trish Gorman Clifford:
I dedicate this book to the Hanrahans and the Gormans: Catherine, Marie,
and Austin Hanrahan, who taught me to cope, to appreciate books, to respect
history, and to pursue excellence; Robert, Judy, and Peggy Gorman, who
taught me that by combining intensity, intelligence, imagination, and
integrity, all things are possible. Whatever I didn’t learn from them is entirely
my own fault.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Preface: A Novel Approach
Acknowledgments
A Character List
Prologue: A Little Turbulence
1: A Simple Problem
2: A New Shirt
3: A Moving Target
4: A Working Lunch
5: A Valuable Chain
6: A Thoughtful Workout
7: A Sweeping Vision
8: A Lone Ranger
9: A Team Effort
10: A Fitting Test
11: A Good Call
12: A Constructive Meeting
13: A Seamless Argument
14: A Tailored Presentation
Epilogue: A Staffing Question
A Reading List
About the Authors
PREFACE:
A NOVEL APPROACH
You are about to read a business novel—a story about a recent MBA
graduate engaged in helping a large global firm make an important strategic
decision. As he struggles to contribute to the strategy development process,
our hero, Justin Campbell, discovers the limits of what he did learn in
business school, realizes what he could have learned in school but didn’t, and
—most importantly—unearths some valuable truths about himself.
This book is for:
• High-potential managers charged with developing and implementing
strategies under challenging circumstances
• Current business students eager to apply and integrate lessons about
what firms can and should do to compete successfully
• Readers interested in how strategic decisions are—and could be—
made inside real firms
But why a business novel?
First, we believe that developing and executing strategies effectively
requires the application of sophisticated analytical tools. Some of these tools
are described and applied in this book. To be effective, these tools must be
sensitive to the firm’s unique organizational context. The best way to
describe the complex and sometimes messy interaction between the analytical
and the organizational in the real world is—ironically—through fiction.
Second, strategic decisions go hand in hand with change—change for the
firm choosing a new strategy, change for those charged with executing that
strategy, even change for those facilitating this process. For this reason, the
successful application of rigorous strategic and organizational analysis to
determine a firm’s path ahead must anticipate the change management
processes that enable a firm to travel that path. The novel form makes it
possible to examine the implications of strategic choice on organizational,
managerial, and even personal change to a greater extent than other
approaches.
Finally, strategy work—the work that empowers and enables firms to
determine what customers they will serve, which markets they will
participate in, and how they will create value—is both intellectually engaging
and enjoyable. This novel is our way of bringing strategy lessons to life by
sharing the fun and frustrations that are so often a part of strategy making, but
that can not be easily conveyed in other kinds of books. Our novel is not a
broad-based criticism of modern business education. The title is What I
Didn’t Learn in Business School, not What Business School Didn’t Teach Me.
In fact, Justin—our main character—realizes that he is ultimately responsible
for both what he did and did not learn in business school. At one point, he
realizes, “It’s not that they didn’t teach it; I just didn’t learn it.” On the other
hand, he also finds that the “school of hard knocks” is one of the best
educators of all.
So, why are we qualified to write a business novel about developing and
executing strategy?
Jay Barney, PhD—Jay—is a professor of management and holds the Chase
Chair of Strategic Management at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio
State University. The current president of the Strategic Management Society,
Jay has published over a hundred articles and books on strategy formulation
and implementation—including some of the most highly cited academic
articles in the field—and has worked as a strategic consultant with numerous
firms.
Patricia Gorman Clifford, PhD—Trish—has worked to understand,
develop, and evaluate strategies at hundreds of firms for more than twenty-
five years, including stints consulting at the LEK Partnership, with McKinsey
& Company, and through her own firm. She teaches strategy to MBAs and
executives at the Wharton School of Business, Columbia Business School,
and many other corporate and university venues around the world, and writes
about and consults to organizations facing complex strategy challenges.
Together, we’ve written a book that makes the essential tools of strategic
and organizational success accessible and practical. Our approach builds on
both a thorough knowledge of these tools and a detailed understanding of
how they are used in real organizations. As the book unfolds, Justin discovers
that strategy making is part science, part art, part intuition, part politics, part
analysis, part change management, and part just plain hard work. He also
discovers he likes it.
We hope you like it, too. Enjoy!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We have known each other for over fifteen years. During much of that time,
we wanted to write something together—something that combined Jay’s
largely academic career with Trish’s academic, consulting, and practice
interests. Over the years, we came up with several proposals. Colleagues and
publishers were encouraging, but we were never satisfied with our ideas, and
nothing developed.
Until Vienna.
At a Strategic Management Society meeting in Vienna, we began talking
about why we weren’t satisfied with the book ideas we had tossed around. It
wasn’t, we concluded, that they were bad. Most of them could probably have
been turned into reasonable books. But we weren’t satisfied with them for at
least two reasons.
First, we felt constrained by the industry standard of taking one idea,
concept, or framework and exploring its implications for two hundred or so
pages. In our real-world strategy experience, a single framework was never
powerful enough to be used alone. Indeed, much of the value we brought to
our clients, we thought, was our ability to deftly apply several interrelated
frameworks to a specific problem or opportunity. To write a “single
framework” book would perpetuate the myth that any one framework was
enough to do good strategy work.
Second, our practice of strategic management had also taught us that it was
important to integrate the analytical and organizational aspects of strategy.
An analytically rigorous strategy that can’t be implemented by a firm’s
management team is useless; an organization that successfully implements an
analytically flawed strategy is often expediting its own demise. We wanted to
write something that addressed how strategic choices are made in a richly
nuanced organizational context, with imperfect information, and under
realistic constraints.
The story we wanted to tell—using multiple frameworks that integrated
analytical and organizational reasoning—was nothing like most other
business books. As we passed this idea around, we were told, more than once,
that the key to writing a good business book was to have a single message
about a single idea, the essence of which could be communicated in the
book’s title. When we proposed a more integrated approach, we were asked,
“But what is the central message of your book? What is the one key
takeaway?”
Our central message was that strategy was too complex, and too important,
to be boiled down to a buzzword.
To tell our story, we needed to—literally—tell a story. We concluded that
the best way to reflect both the diversity and the complexity of real world
strategy was to write not a business book, but a business novel. As our
characters experienced the process of strategy making, they would encounter
both analytical and behavioral issues. A novel would allow us to present
many popular strategy tools in an accessible way and would also enable us to
unpack the organizational and managerial dimensions of developing and
evaluating strategies.
A number of people have helped us to appreciate and articulate the
messages in our story.
Jay’s early academic colleagues at UCLA, including Bill McKelvey, Bill
Ouchi, and Dick Rumelt, continue to have an impact on his thinking, as do
his more recent colleagues—Barry Baysinger, Bert Cannella, Javier Gimeno,
Mike Hitt, and Bob Hoskisson when we were all at Texas A&M; and Sharon
Alvarez, Jay Anand, Kate Conner, Jay Dial, David Greenberger, Sharon
James, Konstantina Kiousis, Michael Leiblein, Anil Makhija, Mona Makhija,
Steve Mangum, Jeff Reuer, and Alice Stewart when we were all at Ohio
State. Jay’s MBA and PhD students at all these institutions—many of whom
have gone on to have successful careers in their own right—have also had an
important impact on his thinking.
Trish’s influences from consulting include Bill Barnett, Kevin Coyne,
Nathaniel Foote, John Hagel, Stephen Hall, Sallie Honeychurch, Marc Kozin,
Jim Lawrence, Toby Lenk, Lenny Mendonca, George Stalk, and Patrick
Viguerie. Her cherished clients are too numerous to mention, but Cindy
Monroe, Prisca Peyer-Ehrbar, and Mary Weber have been especially
inspirational. She would like to thank Rich Bettis, Hugh Courtney, Jane
Farran, Therese Flaherty, Jay Galbraith, Pankaj Ghemawat, Bob Hansen, Sue