Inaugural Lecture by Professor Robin Holt

The Poverty of Strategy

Inaugural Lecture by Robin Holt

professor in Entrepreneurship, Politics and Society

Amidst strategy research, very few contributions stray from the ideal of strategy as a calculable, forcefully direct, and explicit attempt of an agent to understand, control, influence and even subjugate elements of its wider environment in order to realize represented ends. As such, strategy is understood as a process of seeing how better to relate to and use things in order to 'do more with less'. Given the world always tends to escape the representations thrown up by such strategic sight (the world is too complex, too changeable, too fickle), exponents of strategic practice are always animated by a sense of urgency and having to 'do better'. Much of the research in strategy is devoted to how this 'doing better' might be understood. What is less often questioned is the question of strategy itself, namely, what is it to have sight over things in the way strategy practice assumes is possible?

A first reading might configure the relationship between strategic sight and the world as an impoverished one because gaps between representations and the real world are ever present: the map will never be sophisticated enough to capture the territory. A second reading, however, finds a deeper sense of poverty. Here the impoverishment lies not with a failure of strategists to assay and grasp the wider organizational and natural environment in strategic visions, but their success. Here I will argue strategy practice is heir to a Renaissance project that associates vision with a dexterity of touch and accuracy of knowledge that can bring with it undoubted accomplishments in controlling people and things. Yet the more capable and world-class is this control, the more it impoverishes those involved. Why? Because in challenging the world to show itself as a measured site of resources, opportunities, achievements, distinctions and goals, strategic vision has no room for feeling and originality. It becomes a small science of imposed patterns.

Never to end on a gloomy note, and following the thought of the Scottish art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, I suggest the possibility of a Gothic riposte, an inherently entrepreneurial vision that is vulgar, independent, restless, humble and collectively realized.

Programme

15:00-15.10: Welcome by Dean of Research Peter Møllgaard, CBS
15:10-16:10: Inaugural lecture by Robin Holt
16:10-16:15: Wrap up by Head of Department Lotte Jensen
16:15-17:15: Reception

Please register by Dec. 7 to: mpp-relations@cbs.dk