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Dynamic strategic thinking

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Forecasting the way markets will evolve and the way technology will evolve is an excruciatingly difficult job. History is strewn with people who make predictions that proved to be wrong. I would like to see far more firm roots to our judgments. —Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1998

Abstract

Market analysts and marketing strategists stress understanding the fundamental dynamics of a market, but how deeply do they think about the interplay of such fundamentals and what frameworks do they use in such thinking? How do business schools teach managers to think this way? The premise of this article is that in their strategizing, senior marketing executives, boards of directors, consultants, and financial analysts should see the market and the firm’s embeddedness in a market as a moving video rather than a static snapshot. The authors propose that what makes the video move are fundamental feedback effects that create the evolutionary paths that a market and a firm may travel. A taxonomy of systemic feedback regularities is presented with applications that demonstrate how the taxonomy and proposed soft mapping techniques can be use to construct dynamic mental models that help managers and consultants improve their dynamic strategic thinking and the strategic foresight of firms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida International University, Florida, USA

    Peter R. Dickson

  2. University of Virginia, Virginia, USA

    Paul W. Farris

  3. University of Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Willem J. M. I. Verbeke

Authors
  1. Peter R. Dickson
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  2. Paul W. Farris
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  3. Willem J. M. I. Verbeke
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Additional information

Peter R. Dickson, Ph.D., is the Knight Ridder Eminent Scholar in global marketing. He was previously the Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., chair of marketing research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Crane professor of strategic marketing, and professor of industrial design at Ohio State University. He has written some 70 articles on buyer and seller behavior, particularly on market segmentation, pricing, and competitive rationality. He is setting up a process/system’s thinking research laboratory at Florida International University.

Paul W. Farris is the Landmark Communications Professor of Business at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Much of his published research is in the area of marketing productivity and budgets. That work has been published in six books and more than sixty articles. Those articles have appeared in professional journals such asThe Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Management Science, Decision Sciences Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Retailing, andSloan Management Review. Professor Farris’s current research is on building coherent systems for evaluating business and marketing metrics.

Willem J.M.I. Verbeke is the SMA chaired professor in sales and account management and the director of the Institute of Sales and Account Management (ISAM) at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His research interests are complex systems theory within marketing, sales and account management networks, the effects of e-business on the cooperation among organizations, and the role of emotions within sales and account management. He has published in journals such asJournal of Marketing andJournal of Applied Psychology. He serves on the editorial board ofJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

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Dickson, P.R., Farris, P.W. & Verbeke, W.J.M.I. Dynamic strategic thinking. JAMS 29, 216–237 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1177/03079459994605

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