SM Hello, this is a Cranfield School of Management podcast. This is one of a series where authors give their thoughts on their books.
Today, I am interviewing Professor Mark Jenkins who has co-written with Veronique Ambrosini and Nardine Collier, Advanced Strategic
Management: A Multi Perspective Approach
. Now Mark, I can see the advantage of a multi perspective approach from an academic’s point of view, but what about from a practitioner’s – can you give me a bit more background on this?
MJ I think the key thing from the practitioner’s perspective is what a lot of people say is that successful companies often change the rules of the game. They provide a different way of looking at a business issue, a strategy issue, and so the value of multi perspectives can challenge established thinking. They can allow you to bring different perspectives that create new insights, new ideas, new opportunities into a business situation that you wouldn’t otherwise have picked up.
SM So in other words, one of the things that you would hope people would get out of the book are some fresh thoughts and fresh perspectives. So let me go through some of the ideas that you put forward. One of them is the idea of institutional theory that looks at the wider industry or institution environment – what would you expect the reader to get from that?
MJ The interesting thing about institutional theory is it focuses on legitimacy ie, that what organisations do is being seen to be legitimate in the business, in the industry they operate. A good example would be professional service firms like law firms, accounting firms and so on. It’s recognising that in certain situations organisations work in a way not to profit maximise, not purely to profit maximise, but also to build reputation legitimacy in the area they work. So, it gives you a lens for looking through some of the issues around that and also thinking through some of the dangers of that.
Often it means there are barriers to change created in these organisations because of these institutional effects and being clear about them and flagging them up can help identify how they may move forward through some of these areas.

Advanced Strategic Management
SM So, one of the things that managers should do in looking at their strategy is to say are we being constrained by the institution, the industry?
MJ Absolutely – and it’s when you get the same thing – one of the things that they talk about in institution theory is isomorphism – a long word, but essentially what it means is everyone becoming like everyone else. So firms copy each other because they want to be seen to be doing the right thing. Things like best practice, benchmarking and so on – they are all doing the same thing. Of course the problem then is that nobody is different in the customer’s eyes – everyone is doing the same thing.
SM
So, if we move on to look at another one, and that’s around location, the spatial perspective on strategy – could you say a bit more about that?
MJ
Yes. I mean that is saying that where you are located is actually quite an important area, both in creating opportunities, getting resources like human labour, knowledge, linked to other institutions that may also be in the region. But it also can bring challenges like how information leaks out to your competitors – all those sorts of issues.
So getting you to think about location, where you are located, the implications of that, particularly around the global strategy can be quite far reaching.
SM So, in other words, if you are looking at a strategy you need to say are there issues that we need to consider around location – pros and cons?
MJ
Absolutely – and where you relocate, where you open a new office.
It helps you bring together some of the key variables and issues you need to be thinking about. It’s not just a question of where is the cheapest site that we can operate in – there may be some very big issues around access to customers, around access to knowledge and how the business will develop. And so it comes back to creating competitive advantage by where you are located, as much as who you are as an organisation.
SM So one of the things, I guess again really, is to surface some of the assumptions that people are making really and both challenge them and say, how can we make the most of this?
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Advanced Strategic Management
MJ Absolutely. That is the theme that permeates the book. It’s let’s take a different perspective on that, what does that say to what we are doing now, what challenges does that raise, what different assumptions? Because each perspective is based on some different assumptions and of course the assumptions that we start with are going to be quite influential really in where we end up in our thinking.
SM Now, you mentioned competitors. I would like to consider game theory because that seems to involve competitors. I suspect it’s wildly misunderstood sometimes, but what are you doing when you are looking at game theory and how would that play out in a managerial context?
MJ
Yes. One of the techniques and a tool that is featured in a chapter is the value net and essentially what it is that is helping you think through a competitive situation in what actually are the best outcomes perhaps for both players. It also works very well in collaborative, in alliances, collaborative contexts. So thinking through some of the different strategic partners and the different implications for different partners and how you relate to those partners, game theory gives you some good tools and frameworks to work through those ideas.
SM
Does it lead to any sense of kind of closing down and leaving more hostility and “well, they are going to move against me” kind of mentality?
MJ
I think where game theory works well is on those kind of one to one situations – there may be two main competitors or someone you want to collaborate with. It works particularly well in those frameworks. I think it can also though flag up where the win wins – if you will pardon the cliché – might be. In other words it’s not just about fighting the competitor, it’s also finding opportunities where you can both gain, perhaps through extending the market and developing the market in different directions that may actually reduce the competitive intensity. That might be one of the outcomes from using some of these game theory tools.
SM Let’s move on then to look at one that seems to have gained a lot of currency in recent years and that is the resource based view of the firm. So, again looking at competitive advantage, but doing it from the point of view of looking internally as well.
MK Yes. Again, in a lot of the business planning text books, the
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Advanced Strategic Management approach of strategy, is you look outside. You look at your external environment and then you look at what you need to do internally to respond to that. The resource based view starts from a different place. It effectively says if we want to find competitive advantage, let’s find those things that are distinctive and different to us and see where we can apply them in the outside environment. So, it’s not saying one is right and one is wrong, it just generates different strategic options, different ideas as to where the organisation could go.
SM Do you think firms have got much idea of their own strengths? I mean the companies I visit a lot tend to be rather smug really in a kind of rather loose way. “ Well, we are the best, we do these things better than our competitors” and so on, without being very specific and actually very objective about it?
MJ
Absolutely, and I think in each chapter there are some tools and frameworks. And in the resource based view chapter, there is the
VRIN framework which is getting organisations to be a lot more systematic and thorough in the way they think about their strengths.
Often organisations come up with things like “it’s our marketing capability”, but actually everyone in the industry has strength in that area. So what is really distinctive and different – what is rare about what makes you different?
SM So VRIN stands for?
MJ
VRIN stands for Valuable – the assets must be valuable; they must be Rare; they must be Inimitable – they must be difficult to imitate; and they must be difficult to substitute – Non-substitutable.
SM Now, if we move on to a different perspective, one that seems in some ways more psychological, the cognitive perspective, where you need I think – if I get it right – to be aware of your own thinking and processes and perspectives.
MJ Yes. The cognitive perspective I find one of the most powerful in the strategy sense because essentially what it is saying is what is the mindset that the managers are bringing to this. A great example is who are the competitors, who are our competitors and a lot of the research in cognition says typically managers will have a very limited set of competitors that they use to think about their strategy and so on. So the cognitive perspective challenges that and says OK, are there ways that we can free ourselves from some of these limitations that we place in terms of the way we look at competitors, the way we
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Advanced Strategic Management look at strategies, the way we look at opportunities in the business?
So the first stage is to be clear about some of the cognitive assumptions, the boundaries that you are putting on your view of the world.
SM I suspect that is quite hard to do on your own isn’t it? If we all sat round together and said “What are our assumptions?”, you wouldn’t come up with very much.
MJ
No. One of the techniques we talk about are techniques to flag up where we are thinking now – things like cognitive mapping techniques that the article refers to, which is a way of visually representing where you are now. And from that, that moves you into thinking about how you can challenge, how you can change, how you can invert some of those thinkings and ideas.
SM If we look a bit wider again, one of the things we talked about earlier when we talked about game theory was looking at setting up partnerships and so on. There is network theory as well and I would quite like to explore that because in many ways firms tend to assume that they are kind of on their own really. Now, you seem to be suggesting in this chapter that there is something about networks and relationships that you should consider.
MJ
Absolutely, and again you can think of industries where networks are particularly strong. Things like biotechnologies and so on where you have got lots of small firms working together. But in many sectors it is the network that is the key thing, where you have got suppliers who may also be buyers, but other technologies coming in. It’s often your ability to configure a network, to create value to a customer, and the network theory really helps you distil down who is in your network, where are you located in that network and the implications for how you manage those relationships.
SM
So overall, what you seem to be suggesting is that if you don’t look into these multi perspective ways, you are actually missing a trick really. You are either making assumptions or you are losing out on some potential strengths that you could have – is that right?
MJ Absolutely, yes. And the story that is often told is the blind men and the elephant. They all see a different creature because they are all seeing one part. One is holding the trunk, one the leg, one the ear, the tail, but actually it’s only through bringing those different perspectives together that you get a better sense of the whole
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Advanced Strategic Management elephant – that is really what we are talking about here.
SM
Now you do, towards the end of the book, give a case study of a small company, quite attractive, over thirty years, that Cosworth
Engineering grew and developed and so on. Now it seems about the last company in the world to look at strategy. I mean they were very much, from what I understand from the book, very much a sleeves rolled up, non fussy, non bureaucratic, get on it with it kind of company really that evolved over time. Now what can we learn about these multi perspective strategies from this case study?
MJ Well, I think you have summed it up in the sense that at one level you can apply strategy frameworks and say well it’s very clear what they did. They positioned themselves further up the value chain, they identified their customers, they identified a gap in the value chain around these specialist engine technologies and working on gear boxes as well. So that was one issue. The other is that you apply these logics, but actually when you are in the middle of it, it feels very different. It’s very entrepreneurial, it’s very opportunistic and I think that is how strategy is actually. I think we often post rationalise it to be this very logical, systematic thing – this is very different. But it also shows that you can bring some of these different lenses, like network theory, like cognition, into seeing how they played a role in the success of Cosworth Racing and that is the critical peak.
Each perspective has something to say about the case, but a different something to say about the case. So it was a useful case for us to use, for us to say OK we can cut into it from many different perspectives and all of them give some insight into the strategy of this organisation and the success of the organisation.
SM
That is interesting – thank you very much. I think what you have helped me to do is to say from a quite formidable book that looks a bit like an academic textbook, you can actually take this and apply it in a very real context.
MK Thank you.
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