An Ontological Shift

Abstract

Various scholars have attempted to write the definitive history of modern strategic management. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management (Mintzberg et al., 1998) may be the most widely read such attempt — but there are many others.9 The narrative that these histories offer has become quite familiar to researchers as well as practitioners: over the course of several decades, what we call ‘strategy’ has evolved from a business plan that originates in the mind of a long-term visionary leader; to become a process of market analysis undertaken by expert number-crunchers; and, finally, to appear as the adaptive process through which an organizational system makes sense of itself and its environment.