Assignment 1

As modern organizations are working in continuously demanding and changing

environment, thus require a regular monitoring of environment and necessary adaption of
changes accordingly. Managers are increasingly confronting with a complicated, vague
and vigorously changing environment and organizational factors across all levels,
managers and non-managers both are likely to adapt process, make sense out of it, then
propagate a confound stream of information in order to solve problems and make
decisions. Certainly, such are the levels of chaos, stress and fluctuation within the modern
workplace that DAvini (1994) defined as the term hyper-competition in an effort to
summarize the conventional organizational reaction to this state of matters.
Strategic competence can be defined as the ability of organizations (or more accurately
its employees) to obtain, collect, monitor, make sense and act upon information of
importance in order to survive for longer run and for the well-being of organization. By
utilizing the strategically insights like RBV of the firm (Grant, 1996), this core
competence makes effort to combine together characteristics of both individuals and
organization, appropriately constructed to ensure that organization actively detect even a
weak signal of change and then act accordingly, , thereby reducing the risks of cognitive
immobility and mental preconception. These signs of change are then selected, filtered
and portray in such a way that allows specific groups and individuals to react
conveniently to the unforeseen triumph.
However, its purpose is not to prove that organizations or individuals are nothing more
than inactive processors of information, but to emphasize the importance of active
strategic competence and its ability to continuously shape the sense out of collected
information (Gioia and Chittipendi, 1991; Maitlis, 2005). Therefore, strategic
competence is nothing more than combination of calculated processes that includes social
variables as well (Lant and Shapira, 2001a, 2001b). Thus, providing concrete evidence
that organizations growth and survival rate immensely depend upon the insightful and
competent strategies. Organizations need to build up a system that predict the changing
environment abruptly and then have competent strategy to meet up the expectations.
Moreover, it also helps to keep the organization on its goal path and thus provides right
directions to success.

Indeed some sectors of industry and some organizations require more from strategic
management than others. For instance, private sectors need to adapt the changes more
rapidly and accurately than government sector organizations. The main reason is that
government policies do not require a change for a calculated period of time, whereas in

private sectors things change with the blink of an eye. Similarly, suppliers of raw
materials to manufacturers of end product face less vigorous environment than the
manufacturers of end products. Hence it is clear for sure that strategic management is
more important for some organizations or industries than some others.

As argued above, strategic competence needs the patterns of elaborated subjective maps.
However, there lies a possible crisis. Strategic managers need to be capable of accessing
and processing a large amount of information with concern to details. We can often
found, what we are looking for, in these details and attain real insights that will stop
organizations to launch series of actions which may result in failure from the beginning
or may allow organizations to identify the unexpected problems before they emerge, so as
to be capable of taking the corrective actions. On the other side, too much of information
may also prove to be dubious or fad, depending upon the finite processing competencies
of the individual manager to refine information. It is clear that two types of expertise are
desired in order to deal with this complicated state of affairs. In order to process details
analytical skills set is need with a complementary set of skills that require individuals to
continuously monitor the big picture in a more comprehensive way.

References:
DAvini, R.A.I. (1994). Hypercompetition. New York: Free Press.
Grant, R. M. (1996). Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Strategic Management
Journal, 17, 109-122.
Gioia, D.A. and Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic initiation.
Strategic Management Journal, 12, 433-48. Gioia, D.A. and Ford, C.M. (1996).
Tacit knowledge, self-communications, and sense making in organizations. In L. Thayer (Ed.)
Organization Communication: Emerging Perspectives. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Pp. 83-102.
Lant, T.K. and Shapira, Z. (2001b). Introduction: Foundations of research on cognition in
organizations. In T.K. Lant and Z. Shapira (eds), Organizational Cognition: Computation and
Interpretation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Lant, T.K. and Shapira, Z. (Eds.) (2001a). Organizational Cognition: Computation and
Interpretation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.