Adaptive Strategy - critical summary review

A Recent History

It has not been long since studies on strategy for achieving better results in the corporate world began to be conducted. Looking back, we can observe that the earliest literature on this topic is not much more than forty years old. In terms of methodological scientific thought, that is very little.

Even today, there is no great abundance of academic work addressing the importance of following sound strategies to achieve success in the corporate world. A large portion of the content on this subject is fragmented, spread across books and in-person lectures, with even less appearing in academic theses.

But What Is Strategy?

Before anything else, we need to break down this powerful little word. Strategy is a term with Greek origins. The literal meaning of strategos is commander of an army. This is because, in the nineteenth century, the word was used exclusively in a military context. In wars and battles, strategies were devised to determine the best ways to overpower enemies, conquer territories, and lose the fewest soldiers in combat.

It was only after the second half of the twentieth century that strategy began to be applied, studied, and dissected in the business environment. Surprising, is it not? If today it is impossible to think about corporate success without deploying sound strategies, less than half a century ago no one was even discussing the subject.

Good managers work daily with an awareness of the importance of charting routes, setting goals, outlining objectives, and following through with great discipline to achieve strong numbers and stand out amid increasingly fierce competition. But this is recent.

Until the middle of the last century, success was simply attributed to whoever delivered good numbers and results. Nothing more. There was no concern with medium- and long-term projections, so changes were harder to bring about. In a digital world where technological shifts happen constantly, thinking that way is no longer viable.

And this paradigm shift took quite a long time to happen. It took a bold economist immersing himself in the corporate world for a new way of thinking about business administration to emerge.

And Then Came Michael Porter

Until the first half of the twentieth century, little was said about the importance of managing companies with greater organization, with short-, medium-, and long-term plans, observing future scenarios and projecting possible changes. All of this is the core of what we understand as strategy.

Gradually, this new way of thinking began to spread — the idea that it is not enough to simply produce efficiently and quickly in order to remain at the top of the corporate world. Slowly, a new vision was taking shape. According to it, excelling in your own activities alone was not sufficient to guarantee competitive advantages over rivals.

Nobody paid much attention to this. If the numbers went up, everything was fine. There was a gap in the academic environment. There were no theses, well-developed concepts, or scientific texts dissecting the past, present, and future demands of the executive market. Only specialized consultancies in each sector dealt with the subject, without much attention to the global landscape.

Then, in the late 1970s, a bold economist chose to immerse himself in the corporate environment to develop his academic theses. Michael Porter was a young scholar taking his first steps at the Harvard Business School. There, he decided to develop theories about the corporate world. Other professionals dedicated to business management were skeptical about the success of such an ungrateful mission.

But Porter revolutionized the study of strategy. The word became part of the corporate vocabulary as a mantra to be followed. The world's greatest managers began to understand how the existence of companies that did not think in terms of strategic models would be shorter.

Porter's work was so influential in the management world that even his doctoral dissertation, on market competitiveness, used as a reference his revolutionary work on the importance of strategy in the corporate world. In Porter's definition, strategy is the act of integrating the set of activities within a company.

For him, the success of a strategy depends on being able to do many things well and knowing how to integrate each of them. If there is no alignment between the activities, there is no distinctive strategy and no sustainability. Ultimately, results depend on operational efficiency, with strategy put into practice.

Decades later, does anyone dare question Porter's words?

But What Is Adaptive Strategy?

Every competitive advantage is transitory in a world as disruptive as the digital era. For this reason, any strategy adopted must be flexible, with the capacity to help the organization make agile decisions. It is essential to respond to the increasingly fast and demanding movements of the market as quickly as possible.

This is where adaptive strategy comes in. This model for thinking about the paths charted for a company's future occupies a central place. It is the company's primary focus. But it is also rooted at every hierarchical level and in every individual within the organization.

To illustrate this in a very simple and practical way, think of a chameleon. It transforms according to its environment, mimicking the characteristics of the place it occupies, continuously, so that predators do not notice its presence. A company that practices adaptive strategy works like a chameleon. It keeps adapting to each environment — but in order to be seen and to stay competitive.

Adaptive strategy represents an evolution of those first strategy concepts applied to the business world. Without dismissing the benefits of operational efficiency, this new model of corporate thinking values a vision of dynamism to ensure the relevance of positioning for organizations and the value of core competencies. And from there, it evolves to adapt to the current environment, incorporating elements more suited to the reality of today's economy.

Adaptive strategy is nothing more than a step beyond Michael Porter's teachings. Without understanding the basics of strategy, it is impossible to apply this new concept in the corporate world. And without putting adaptive strategy into practice in the twenty-first century, the chances of falling behind increase considerably.

Adaptive Strategy Put into Practice

To chart a good adaptive strategy, you need to work with data, agility, and culture. All of them in an integrated and simultaneous way. The customer is the primary focus. It is because of the customer that continuous innovations are carried out, in pursuit of better results. In adaptive strategy, the customer is not merely a buyer but a protagonist of the process, being heard and having their profile analyzed at every stage of the work through to the final product.

Adaptive strategy is not just a nice speech. It means including the customer in the process, as the center of an activity that, more than generating good sales results, creates new values for the company. Consider companies like Uber and Netflix — beyond offering a quality service, they have a consolidated image before the public.

Have you noticed how comfortable we feel interacting with and offering feedback on how these companies operate? Can you imagine that happening two decades ago?

A good adaptive strategy does not merely replace the classic management model, nor is it reduced to adopting a multidisciplinary team with talents across various fields. It connects all elements of the company. Interdependence is fundamental to a good adaptive strategy. Everyone is connected — both success and failure are the results of collective work.

The Importance of Organizational Culture in Adaptive Strategy

It is not easy to implement the migration to an adaptive strategy within a company. New elements need to be adopted in a practical way. After all, this process is highly complex and challenging, yet necessary.

Even if the company is aware of the need for change, it is much easier to keep things as they are than to work toward new and unpredictable paths.

For this reason, before implementing this new model, it is necessary to strengthen the internal organizational culture. It is the only way to solidify a new way of managing.

To shift the concepts that have been established for many decades within the company, there must be an awareness at all levels of why it is necessary to adopt a less rigid and more change-prone path. Knowing where the company stands, what changes it is going through, and where it wants to go must be disseminated across every level of the hierarchy.

For this to happen successfully, employees need to feel like part of a whole, not like expendable cogs of little use. The entire system of philosophy and beliefs of the company transforms when an adaptive strategy is adopted.

And in your company — is the strategy flexible and adaptive, or static and stuck in time?

Final Notes

The digital world has been driving increasingly rapid changes. And whoever does not adapt to them inevitably falls behind the competition and ends up forgotten by customers. The main lesson left by José Salibi Neto and Sandro Magaldi is that, more and more, it is not enough to think about strategy with a static mentality. It is necessary to analyze scenarios and adapt to ongoing transformations. You do not want to be left behind, do you?

12min Tip

Listen to the microbook What Matters Is Your Result. In it, you will understand how much external scenarios — of change, uncertainty, or crisis — need to be overcome day by day. After all, at the end of the day the numbers do not lie, and your performance needs to be the best possible, even when things are not going well.