Business Strategy Implementation

In the Mile and Snow topology, Raymond Miles and Charles Snow delineated business level strategies into four categories, these being Prospector, Defender, Analyzer, and Reactor. Miles and Snow then went on to define an organization that follows a Prospector strategy as one that was highly innovative and constantly on the lookout for new markets and opportunities (Pittino & Visintin, 2009). A perfect example of a firm that uses Prospector strategies is 3M. Since the inception of its first innovative product, invisible tape, 3M has managed to continue to be among the most innovative major corporations in the world with the wide range of innovative products a testament to its creativity. The second strategy is the Defender strategy. A Defender is thus a company that concentrates its efforts on protecting its current market share so as to maintain a stable growth while serving the existing client base (Pittino & Visintin, 2009). An example of such a company is the BIC Corporation which deals in pens. While the initial products of the firm were innovative, the firm now concentrates on defend its substantial market share. Analyzers fall into the category of firms that are intent on both maintaining their market share while being open to the development of any innovative products that may impact its revenue streams. Rather than invent new products, Analyzers tend to adopt a “second-in” strategy that allows them to come in just after an invention has been introduced and perfect it, and as a result are able to protect their base of operations while at the same time being able to create new market opportunities (Massa & Testa, 2009). Most large corporations fall into this category, a perfect example of one being International Business Machines (IBM). Reactor organizations are those that have no consistent strategic approach. Instead, they model their strategy after the market conditions. One characteristic of such firms is that they tend to react to rather than influence market events. As a result, they rarely perform as well as organizations that adopt the other strategies. 

Knowledge is predominantly categorized into one of two categories, either it is explicit or tacit. The distinguishing characteristic between explicit and tacit knowledge is how easy it is to share. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been well documented or articulated. Typically, such knowledge exists in the form of words, numbers, mathematical and scientific formulae, or some sort of code. As a result, it is relatively easy to communicate, store, and distribute through different mediums be they books, visual, or oral medium (Collins, 2010). However, that knowledge which can be so expressed is only a small fraction of that which is available, or figuratively speaking, only the tip of the iceberg. Most of human knowledge is tacit, or highly personal and hard to formalize. As to explicit knowledge which is codified or formalized, tacit knowledge presents an innate difficulty in transferring from one party to another through written or spoken words. Since it is deeply rooted in an individual’s actions and experiences, it is also hard to communicate. Knowing the different types of knowledge is crucial to understanding how to create and share it. It is a well-regarded fact that human intervention is usually needed to interpret and extract various types of useful information (Lee 2000). As such, any efforts at implementing business strategies need to take ownership of explicit knowledge along with what people know in order to preserve the expertise present in a company and speed up the process of implementing a strategy or applying new ideas (. One of the inherent dangers of ignoring either form is that valuable human and knowledge resources will be wasted or even lost completely unless the managers in an organization emphasize the need to gather, sort, transform, record and share knowledge. Tacit knowledge, for instance, can account for 90 percent of the knowledge in an organization, and as such, (Lee, 2000). Thus, it is essential to factor this knowledge into decisions that are likely to result in outsourcing, downsizing, mergers and terminations so as not to lose information that would otherwise have proven useful in the implementation of company strategies.

References

Becerra, M., Lunnan, R., & Huemer, L. (2008). Trustworthiness, risk, and the transfer of tacit and explicit knowledge between alliance partners. Journal of Management Studies, 45(4), 691-713.

Collins, H. (2010). Tacit and explicit knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Lee Sr, J. .(2000). Knowledge management: The intellectual revolution. IIE Solutions, 32(10), 34-34.

Massa, S., & Testa, S. (2009). How do Miles and Snow’s strategic types differ in their knowledge assets? Evidence from Italian SMEs. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 7(4), 377-386.Pittino, D., & Visintin, F. (2009). Innovation and strategic types of family SMEs: A test and extension of Miles and Snow’s configurational model. Journal of enterprising culture, 17(03), 257-29