After years of seeking a concise way to describe what he sees as the essence of an effective strategy, Dr. George Lehman hopes he has found it.
Lehman, chair of business studies and director of graduate programs in business at Bluffton University, told a campus colloquium audience on Nov. 14 that he thinks “strategic opportunism” is an apt new name for a new understanding of strategy.
As defined by Donald Sull from the London Business School, strategic opportunism is the key to success in today’s volatile markets because it “allows firms to seize opportunities that are consistent with the bundle of resources and capabilities that sustain their profits.”
Lehman, who teaches a course on strategy in Bluffton’s master of business administration degree program, delivered his annual lecture as the university’s Howard Raid professor of business. He titled it “A Strategy by Any Other Name …,” based on the Shakespearian line that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” from “Romeo and Juliet.”
He allowed that “opportunism as a word does not have a sweet smell, but I think it has a valuable meaning” in the strategic context. An opportunist organization is in touch with its customers, suppliers and the broader culture, he explained, “and routinely has people asking what is happening that we should be paying attention to, and what could we make happen if we put our energies to it.”
Such an organization is looking for opportunities, Lehman continued, noting that Sull’s “resources and capabilities” refer to the self-knowledge “that enables us to sort out which opportunities to consider and which ones to discard.”
“Addressing a critical need because you have the resources and capabilities to do it makes sense” if using them is financially viable, he said.
“Organizations have to be willing to seize opportunities, not just explore, consider, study and occasionally implement,” he added.
Lehman urged that organizations learn to understand themselves and their capabilities better. “We don’t need to study various strategies as much as we need to truly understand our organizations,” he said. The lack of that knowledge “is still a core issue for many, if not most, organizations,” he maintained.
He suggested, too, that “intelligence and creativity are much more about combining familiar objects in unfamiliar ways than about brand new ideas.” For example, he said, “Bill Gates and company did very little original creation in the process of developing Windows. They essentially recombined existing processes into a bett
