【正确答案】There is considerable evidence to suggest that strategic driftparticularly affects organisations which have experienced a longperiod of relative continuity during which strategy has either remained unchanged or changed incrementally to react torelatively minor changes in the external environment or industry. This appears to be the case at TMZ. It had enjoyed 35 yearsof success and growth based on contracting musical artists to its record label and recording and distributing their songs andmusic through an appropriate physical media. Table one shows that revenues increased continuously in the period1965–2000. Profit margins fell during the period, reflecting problems in cost control as established musical acts took longerto produce albums and senior staff of TMZ adopted a more relaxed and indulgent approach to their artists. However, even atthe end of the period, TMZ remained a profitable company. Table one: gross and net profit margin – 1965–2000 During this period, the company had reacted positively to significant changes in its environment. Sociocultural changes,represented by musical fashion and technology changes (from vinyl, through tape cassette to compact disc (CD)) had beensuccessfully surmounted. However, such success can often lead to complacency, with the organisation continuing to pursuea strategy which progressively fails to address the changing strategic position of the organisation and this failure leads todeterioration in organisational performance. This is known as strategic drift. Evidence for this strategic drift starts to emerge in 2003, four years after the launch of the first file sharing company. Peoplewithin TMZ warned about the possible implications of digital downloading of music. However, senior management at TMZhad rejected this warning and believed that the drop in revenue was due to ‘the wrong music, promoted to the wrong peopleat the wrong price’. They adopted a policy of signing new artists, increasing advertising spend and cutting CD prices. In thepolicy, 2003–2007, revenues dropped significantly and the company made significant losses (see table two).

【正确答案】The learning organisation The point has already been made that strategic drift will take place when changes in an organisation’s environment take placeat a greater rate than the rate of strategic change within the organisation itself. In such circumstances, the organisation beginsto be increasingly misaligned with the environment it is operating in. The challenge is to try to ensure that misalignment doesnot occur in the first place, but if it does, to tackle it quickly. The likelihood of strategic drift suggests that the strategy development process in an organisation needs to encourage peopleto have the capacity and willingness to challenge and change their core assumptions and ‘ways of doing things’. This is oneof the commonly claimed principles of a ‘learning organisation’ Traditionally, organisations have been organised and structured around order and control. They were built for stability andcontinuity, rather than change. However, influential writers have increasingly claimed that this is unsuitable for the dynamicconditions of trading in the 21st century. They have suggested that modern society and all of its institutions are in acontinuous process of transformation and to react to this we all must become adept at learning. ‘We must become able notonly to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and developinstitutions which are ‘learning systems’, that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuingtransformation.’ (Donald Schon) The learning organisation is an ‘ideal’ towards which organisations should evolve in order to respond to contemporarypressures. It is characterised by a view that both collective and individual learning is key to organisational success. A learningorganisation is one which is capable of continual regeneration based on the knowledge, experience and skills of individualsworking in an organisational culture which encourages mutual questioning and challenge. It emphasises the potentialcapability of an organisation to regenerate from within. Advocates of the learning organisation suggest that the collective knowledge of all the individuals within an organisationgreatly exceeds what the organisation ‘knows’ in its formal documentation, filing and information systems. They suggest thatit is the responsibility of management to encourage processes which reveal the knowledge of individuals and encourage thesharing of this knowledge. Hence the learning organisation is closely connected with the principles of knowledgemanagement, the other strand in the CEO’s policy statement. As a result of free-flowing knowledge, individuals within anorganisation become more sensitive to the changes happening around them and this helps them contribute to identifyingopportunities and threats in the external environment and also to them developing strategies to tackle these threats or toexploit the opportunities. In such an approach managers play a less directive and a more facilitative role. It is easy to see the attraction of this to TMZwhere the impact of digital downloading was already being discussed in 2003, but was dismissed by complacent seniormanagement. In contrast, in a learning organisation, ideas which do not fit in with current norms are not dismissed or ignored,but acted upon. Questioning and challenging the ‘taken-for-granted’ is essential if an organisation is to avoid strategic drift. Ithelps build a resilient organisation which does not take success for granted and reinvents itself using internal capabilities tobuild a new business model. A new business model was eventually adopted by TMZ, but only when it was close to extinctionand radical change was needed to ensure survival.

【正确答案】Knowledge management Johnson, Scholes and Whittington define organisational knowledge as the ‘collective and shared experience accumulatedthrough systems, routines and activities of sharing across an organisation’. Managing organisational knowledge is importantbecause as organisations get larger, it becomes more difficult to share what people know. The organisation increasingly doesnot ‘know what it knows’ and so it makes unnecessary mistakes, duplicates activity and misses opportunities as a result ofthis. Furthermore, it is also increasingly likely that organisations, particularly in countries such as Artazia, will have to achievecompetitive advantage through accumulated experience (their knowledge), rather than through conventional assets such asphysical resources. Fearghal McHugh writing in the Student Accountant (issue 07/2010) suggested that ‘having knowledgecan be regarded as more important than possessing the other means of production – land, building, labour and capital –because all the other sources are readily available in an advanced global society Knowledge management itself has been facilitated by the increasing functionality of computerised information systems. In this context an important distinction is made between data, information and knowledge. Knowledge is primarily associated withthe discovery of trends or patterns of behaviour. Discovering such patterns would have helped TMZ realise that consumers were moving away from purchasing physical music media to downloading its digital equivalent. In the market which TMZcurrently finds itself in, discovering patterns and trends remains extremely important as consumer behaviour is stillunpredictable and is affected by new technologies, emerging legislation and changes in values. Conventional knowledge management systems are often based around an intranet application where all explicit knowledgeabout processes, procedures, standards, products, customers and policies are stored. Such repositories are convenient placesto locate explicit organisational knowledge and they have practical benefits, such as eliminating the costs of storage, printingand distribution. Data warehouses can store vast amounts of information and provide the basis of reports, comparisons andresponses to queries posed at different levels of summation. Data mining software may be used to discover previouslyunknown relationships between data and these can be used to guide decision-making and predict future behaviour. However, although technology has provided many opportunities to analyse the formal data captured by an organisation, thesocial aspects of knowledge sharing remain important. Employees need opportunities to develop, discuss and shareinformation which they feel would be mutually beneficial. Not only might this require physical facilities (coffee areas,restrooms, social and sports clubs), it also requires a culture of trust in the organisation supported by a leadership approachwhich values learning and an organisational structure which supports communication and information sharing. Thus there isa clear link between knowledge management and the principles of the learning organisation. Social networks can also beused to support this facet of knowledge sharing and indeed might be the natural preference of the younger employees of theorganisation. It is in the social aspects of knowledge sharing that many employees reveal their tacit knowledge (knowledgewhich they do not know they know, as opposed to explicit knowledge) which can be vital for the effective performance of aparticular task.