92 Long Range Planning, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 92 to 99, 1989 Printed in Great Britain 0024-6301/89 $3.00 + .OO Pergamon Press plc zyxwvutsr Managing Strategic Change in a Mature Business zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Richard W hipp, Robert Rosenfeld and Andrew Pettigrew The article draws on the experience of four sectors of the U.K. economy to suggest what the competitive conditions of the next decade might look like. The distinction is made between barriers to entry and barriers to success. Strategic management in the more successful companies appears to involve the common ability to sustain strategic flexibility. The majority of the piece indicates how this quality has been fashioned and how the process of its creation and maintenance has been managed in the companies concerned. Evidence from the four sectors is used to speculate on some of the key determinants of strategic flexibility in the 7990s. If the 1980s can be described as an era dominated by managers concerned with creating value for share- holders in large organizations, the 1990s appear to be shaping up as a period of considerably greater competitive turmoil. Indications abound of markets becoming frenetic due to de-regulation or a lower- ing of previously insurmountable barriers to entry. Survival and growth strategies in the 1990s will require greater emphasis on flexibility-not only in production, but also in markets as well as organiza- tional and managerial requirements. There is little doubt that adaptiveness to the changing competitive context has been, and shall remain, a key factor to the success of an organiza- tion. As one would expect, the strategy literature has tended to reflect the concerns of senior managers of the period. In an analysis of the strategic planning literature from 1965 to 1986, Taylor (1986) found that themes have changed dramatically over time. Prevalent issues have ranged from technological forecasting and limits to growth (1965-1973) through union power and public sector spending (1974-1979) to a focus upon mergers and acqui- sitions and competitor analysis (1980-1984). This paper attempts to identify the likely concerns The authors are at the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change at Warwick Business School. of senior managers in the 1990s and forewarn readers of some of the emerging issues. To do so, we will relate the competitive requirements of the 1990s with some of the organizational characteristics which would permit firms to take advantage of emerging opportunities. The objective of the work is the early identification of ‘best practice’, in terms of strategic change management. Within the organ- izations presently under study in the 198Os, we have been able to examine the forces behind strategic and operational changes as well as to examine the processes by which organizations implemented such change. It is clear that many of the dilemmas faced by these firms are forerunners of the dominant issues expected for the 1990s (Keichel, 1988). The Project The Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change specializes in conducting theoretical and practical research around some of the key problems of strategy and change in private and public sector organizations. The work presented in this paper is part of a 3-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the Management of Strategic and Operational Change. The research method used is based upon compre- hensive case studies of nine firms drawn from four mature sectors of the U.K. economy. They are: Merchant Banking Automobile Mantrfacturing Kleinwort Benson Jaguar Robert Fleming Peugeot Talbot Hill Samuel Lijz Assurance Book Publishing Prudential Longman Clerical Medical ABP The project treats the formulation and implemen- tation of strategic change as a continuous and iterative process over time. (Whipp, Rosenfeld and Pettigrew, 1986.) Environmental disturbances, with