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Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to be speaking with an old friend, Richard Whittington, who is a professor at the Said Business School at Oxford University.

Good afternoon, Richard.

Richard Whittington: Good afternoon, Karl. Good to see you again.

KM: Richard, one of the things that you have been writing about, which I think is particularly intriguing, is the idea of open strategy. What do you mean by open strategy?

RW: Yes, open strategy is a concept that relies on some of the work that is being done in the innovation field - open innovation - and is concerned with the way that strategy is now becoming a much more open, diffuse, transparent and inclusive factor. So strategic planning is no longer now a matter of a smaller lead in the corporate head office or group around a divisional general manager, but is much more inclusive and more open to external sources which might be consulting and also, as a matter of accountability, external shareholders as well.

KM: So why has strategy changed?

RW: Well strategy is changing for all sorts of reasons. I suggest that there are three, or maybe four, key forces which are driving the changes. One I would describe as organizational, another I would describe as social-cultural and the third is effectively the technological angle.

So in terms of the organizational, the organizations in which strategy is taking place are changing enormously. One important issue, if you take the long view on strategy, is the increasing accountability to external shareholders and particularly large investor groups so that, nowadays, people have to justify their strategy to investors and in a completely different way to maybe 20 years ago.

Organizations are different, too, in being much more distributive and being much more global, and so they have to be inclusive to the various parts of their organization distributors around the world. So there is transparency to investors, inclusion of subsidiaries, scattered around the world or different businesses in different fields. So that's the organizational part essentially.

The social-cultural issue is more complex – there are a number of issues here. One of them is the managerial work force – it's quite different, much higher education, and much more skilled strategically then it was 20 years ago. I am referring to 20 years, about, because many of our stereotypes of strategy were formed in the experience of the '70s and '80s. So we have a work force which is much more capable and demanding of inclusion at the same time they are also more mobile, very typically, so nothing is that secret anyway.

So you may as well open up and be more transparent about your strategy because these people are moving around and you can reap the benefits of being more transparent; you get more ideas just as in the open innovation concept – being open to your customers, being open to external stakeholders makes you more effective in innovation. So, too, with the social-cultural changes being more open to external ideas. Ideas from consultants, from business schools, from customers and clients, and from people coming in and out of the organization will help you generate new ideas.

And the third force that I would highlight is the technological. We have, clearly, all sorts of new technologies within organizations to include more people in strategy conversations. IBM strategy jams are a famous example where they developed a new platform for including more people and soliciting more ideas into their strategy process.

Also there is a technology phenomenon that is possibly less welcome - things like WikiLeak are leading to a great deal more leakage of information outside. We are becoming, whether we like it or not, more transparent and my argument, given WikiLeak, and given these other sorts of technologies which allow information to go through organizational boundaries whether you like it or not, we may as well try to capture the advantages of that rather than simply resist the tide.

KM: This has been Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, Talking Management for The Globe and Mail.



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