Dr Dan Kipley

• Doctor of Business Administration - Strategic Management
• Professor (Full) at Azusa Pacific University

The purpose of this paper is to briefly introduce the reader to Ansoffian strategy and the concepts of environmental turbulence and examine their impact on marketing strategy. The authors overlay Ansoff’s identification of turbulence levels to marketing strategy as a dynamic synergy of management processes and innovation which depends on a firm’s p...

While the preceding chapter was concerned with effective ‘pushing’ of a discontinuous change through the firm and assuring its effectiveness and stability; in this chapter, we turn attention to converting the firm into a habitual strategic actor.

An extensive body of literature exists on the subject of organizational behavior and design. Most of it is theoretical, written in academic jargon. This chapter uses the language of business and focuses on organizational forms which have evolved in practice.

As previously discussed, the original approach to strategic planning, a new strategy was chosen to match the historical strengths of the firm. In a discontinuous environment, historical strength by definition becomes future weaknesses. It is necessary therefore to replace the strengths/weakness concept by a more general concept of organizational ca...

Competitive posture analysis determines the future strategy and capability for each SBA of the firm and the strategic investment which will be required. In this chapter, we enlarge our perspective from individual SBAs to their totality. The following questions are answered: (1) What are the alternative approaches to integrating and interrelating th...

Previously, we traced the evolution of the basic general management systems and presented Ansoff’s ‘quick and dirty’ approach to choosing a system for a particular firm. We also dealt with the problem-solving logic embodied in each of the systems. In this chapter, Ansoff’s attention turns to tailoring the system to the needs of a firm.

The discussions covered in this chapter are based on research conducted by Dr. Ansoff and Markku Lahdenpaa. Most of the concepts and tools of strategic analysis developed in the preceding chapters are applicable to the problem of diversifying a firm from a domestic market to a larger international arena.

We turn attention from describing surprising changes to a system for detecting, analyzing, and responding to them. This system is now receiving increasing attention from firms.

In the 1950s, when the response to environmental discontinuities became important, the concept of strategy entered into the business vocabulary. In the early days, the meaning of strategy was not clear. The dictionaries did not help, since following military usage they still defined strategy as ‘the science and the art of deploying forces for battl...

In Parts III and IV, we focused attention on managerial responses which prepare the firm to face a difficult and changing future. Strategy prepares the firm to face its complex external environment, while corporate capability develops responsiveness to anticipated threats and opportunities.

In the second edition of Implanting Strategic Management, Ansoff and McDonnell introduced this chapter with a quote from Machiavelli. In his famous book The Prince, Machiavelli said: ‘There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain of success than to take a lead in the introduction of a new order of thin...

The following are different types of strategic behavior that are observed in practice today. In this section, we shall describe each and compare the conditions under which they are appropriate to the success of a firm.

When the concept of strategy was first developing, the focus was on economic and competitive variables. R&D, like production, was treated as a functional area to which strategic decisions could be assigned for ‘implementation.’

This chapter presents a procedure by which a firm can determine its future general management capability profile. The first version of this procedure appeared in 1976 (Ansoff et al. in From Strategic Planning to Strategic Management. Wiley, New York, 1976-F). The revised procedure presented here has been repeatedly tested in practice with satisfact...

Beginning in the 1950s, firms in the USA and Europe have come under increasing pressures from government, consumers, and environmental protection groups. In the USA, which remained firmly committed to the capitalist free market ideology, some firms responded to the challenge by embracing social causes and engaging in social audits aimed at establis...

In Chapters 21 and 22, we identified the causes of resistance and made some general suggestions for reducing it. In Chapter 23, we identified three ‘natural’ methods for managing change which usually occur without deliberate management of resistance. Ansoff’s suggestions for managing resistance can be applied to all three methods, but they apply pa...

Archimedes is reported to have said: ‘Give me an [appropriate] point of leverage and 1 will turn the world.’ The remark highlights a fundamental truth that the picture of strategic behavior obtained by an observer depends on the knowledge-seeking model (paradigm) through which he perceives reality. At the present time, study of management is in the...

As speed of change accelerates, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict changes with sufficient accuracy and reliability to permit a timely full-scale response

We next turn attention to another type of resistance which we shall call systemic. The two types of resistance are concurrent during the history of a change and they produce similar effects: delays, unanticipated costs, chronic malperformance of new strategies. But, the basic causes are different. One comes from active opposition to change and the...

The management system used by a firm is a determining component of the firm’s responsiveness to environmental changes because it determines the way that management perceives environmental challenges, diagnoses their impact on the firm, decides what actions to take, and implements the decisions.

The preceding two section chapters described the attitude toward resistance which has historically been found in firms and most other organizations. This attitude can be summed up, to borrow from Senator Moynahan, as ‘benign neglect.’ Firms introduce new strategies without anticipating, nor providing, for the resistance, and they deal with it react...

When systematic strategic planning was first introduced during the 1960s, the initial focus was on diversification of the firm. But as firms increasingly faced strategic challenges from technological turbulence, changing competition, saturation of growth, and sociopolitical pressures, it became evident that the problems posed by these challenges co...

In this chapter, Ansoff describes the consequences of the evolving challenges to management of the business firm. One important consequence is differentiation of challenges among firms. This means that the tradition of universal prescriptions for management of all firms must give way to a tailored approach in which each firm identifies its own futu...

Our previous discussion of the evolution of management systems easily gives the impression of a logical untroubled progression from one system to another. In fact, the progression was slow, turbulent, and accompanied by setbacks, whenever the new system disturbed what Machiavelli described as the ‘historical order of things’ within the firm. The ev...

This chapter is based on early research and collaboration between Ansoff and two of his German friends, Werner Kirsch, and Peter Roventa. Kirsch and Roventa’s idea was that the concept of weak signals, which Ansoff developed for analyzing issues in highly turbulent environments, needs to be applied to strategic portfolio analysis. This chapter is b...

This chapter is based on a paper which Igor Ansoff wrote with Dick Brandenburg in 1967. In the paper, they predicted the qualifications which general managers would have to bring to their jobs during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Their principal predictions about complexities and diversity of demands on the general managers are current...

Coming more than 25 years after the last edition, this edition of the groundbreaking Ansoff work on the concepts and practical implementation of strategic management provides up-to-date case studies and simplified figures and offers a comprehensive approach to guiding firms through turbulent environments. In this age of digital transformation, the...

p style="text-align: justify;">Spiritual growth and development is frequently cited as an outcome of participation in service-learning projects. However, little research has focused on measuring the students' ability to understand the connection between the service-learning experience and their personal faith and the ability to live out their Chris...

This article presents research results extending previous work that examined a computer software model used to determine a firm’s strategic performance position (Kipley, Lewis, Jeng, 2010). An important aim of this research has been to establish relationships between the OSPP Matrix center of gravity and firm performance as indicated by financial r...

Purpose ‐ The paper aims to examine Igor Ansoff's research on environmental turbulence and to extend the paradigm. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Ansoff's contribution was examined and applied to a variety of situations. The scale as designed did not capture certain strategic surprises. Findings ‐ The increasingly discontinuous environment requires...

Given the complex and disruptive open-ended dynamics in the current dynamic global environment, senior management recognizes the need for a formalized, consistent, and comprehensive framework to analyze the firm’s strategic posture. Modern assessment tools, such as H. Igor Ansoff’s seminal contributions to strategic diagnosis, primarily focused on...

We present a synthesis of the general methodologies of the Planning School, Learning School, and the Positioning School of strategic formulation which are the most commonly used by academia, research and industry strategic planning. We review the literature from each discipline on these concepts and propose that the cognitive and calculative capabi...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the praxis of the multi-dimensional components of H. Igor Ansoff¹s Strategic Management Systems and the efficacy of use of each of its components relative to the formulation and implementation of corporate level strategy in for-profit, not-for-profit, Small and Medium sized enterprises. Based on empirically v...

Much of the literature dedicated to stakeholder identification has been focused from a 'top-down' view as a determinant of analysis. In this paper, we develop, test, and provide evidence on a new conceptual stakeholder model extending the existing analysis methodology by utilizing a new framework that not only examines the robust interactions occur...