The Future of Strategy in Top-Performing Organizations: Encapsulating Adaptive Capacity, Agility, and Contingency Planning

Abstract

Creating and maintaining competitive advantage is challenging for organizations during the best of times, and is vital in today’s world of globalization, information supremacy and the ever-accelerating pace of innovation. To maximize profits and ensure market dominance, businesses create their “vision,”= implement business plans, and employ strategic planning in a never-ending effort to evolve and adapt to dynamic external, and sometimes internal, environmental challenges. Strategic frameworks for business applications have been evolving since the beginning of the previous century, adding complexities at each reinvention. The proliferation of the internet, and the resultant “flattening” of business organizational structures have created the need to rewrite the foundations of strategic frameworks. An emphasis on organizational agility, with a focus on the successful embedding of that agility as well as flexibility into organizational DNA may be the necessary future elements of successful organizations. It may provide them with a strategic framework in which to operate. This paper explores organizational agility, adaptive capacity, contingency planning, and talent management as the hallmarks of future organization’s strategy development.The author wishes to express thank and appreciation to Professor William Mea for support and guidance in preparing the article as well as for valuable criticism and suggestions.