University Press Scholarship Online

You are looking at 1-1 of 1 items for: keywords : intentions manstra

Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and

Enterprise
J.-C. Spender

Published in print: 2014 Published Online: April Publisher: Oxford University Press
2014
DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199686544 eISBN: 9780191766442 acprof:oso/9780199686544.001.0001
Item type: book

Managers, strategy consultants, and strategy and entrepreneurship

teachers will find this books new paradigm illuminating. In non-academic
style the author takes off from the Knightian uncertainties or knowledge
absences that pervade business and make strategizing both necessary
and valuable. He sketches a structured practice that managers and
consultants might choose to follow, not a theory. Firms create value
only by acting out newly imagined solutions to the opportunities that
uncertainties open up. Strategic judgment is the necessary complement
to rigorous analysis as these are engaged. Spender follows philosophys
turn to language, suggesting firms form first as an idiosyncratic
constructed language (jargon) that helps their participants select what
to pay attention to and interpret what they learn. The entrepreneurs/
CEOs most fundamental task is thus to create and control the firms
language (its business model) and thereby its knowledge. The arc
of practiceuncertaintyjudgmentrhetoriccollaborative practice
turns strategy discourse on its head, presenting it as a constructive
value-creating activity rather than the application of theory. This also
shows how strategic work is morally and ethically burdened. Chapter 1
introduces these ideas. Chapters 2 and 3 review the languages implicit
in consultants strategic tools and academics theories of the firm.
Chapter 4 analyses the constraints to innovative strategic language
that, in Chapter 5, is used to draw in the judgments of those others
the entrepreneur needs to build a viable firm. Chapter 6 considers the
context of private sector strategic work today. There are appendices on
case-work, teaching strategy, current strategy texts, and further reading.

Page 1 of 1