Strategic Flexibility: The Fountainhead

Management of strategic dilemmas and paradoxes is a major concern in modern day organizations. One major strategic dilemma dealt with here is whether to move ahead on the lines of continuity or to initiate change for progress. The traditional strategic management thinking went for an “either–or” framework, that is, to either choose continuity or change. Conventionally, under the stable environment, the strategic thinkers as well as practitioners preferred the strategic route of continuity. But the forces of competition and globalization have proven to be dominant to let the strategic choice heavily tilted toward change in the last two decades. Both continuity and change have a lot of promise to offer for growth of an enterprise and opening new vistas of opportunities and possibilities, and it is a challenge to strategically leverage each one of the opposing forces together. The postmodern management thinking, in general, is tilted toward a “both–and” approach rather than the conventional “either–or” one. The paradigm of flexibility in general and strategic flexibility in particular provide the philosophical basis and act as fountainhead for channelizing framework proposed in this book. This chapter first clarifies the concept of flexibility in general terms and then builds the concept of strategic flexibility as the foundation for rest of the presentation in this book.