Publisher's Synopsis
This text focuses on strategy development in organizations operating under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. By obtaining a better understanding of how strategy emerges in organizations under these conditions, the reader should be in a better position to understand how they can "guide" the emergence of successful strategies.;The majority of strategy and management textbooks present strategy as something that is deliberate, that can be planned, and, most importantly, can be controlled. Yet there are numerous examples of strategies which were neither deliberate or controlled. How can we reconcile this paradox?;This book, with its insights into emergent behaviour in complex systems, seeks to provide the answer. It explains how emergent behaviour in complex systems can be attributed to (local) self-organizing processes - which are inherently unplanned and uncontrollable - rather than (centrally) dictated planning and control. The relevance of this is that emergent behaviour in such systems is analogous to the emergence of strategy in organizations.;The book illustrates - with a case study of an Internet service provider - how this emergent behaviour can be used to interpret emergent strategy development in organizations.
