Strategic Management: Ikea Case Study

‘Strategic Management’ is a very complex term as many eminent researchers and scholars have had different views and conclusions on strategy. According to White (2004), “Strategic Management involves both systematically developing an idea together with its implications and testing the empirical validity & usefulness of that idea against the real world.” Thus strategy is not only about planning for future but also about confirming the validity of the hypothesis considered and implementing it successfully. Strategy formation may take various forms such as implicit, explicit or emergent. Implicit strategy is a strategy formed by intuitions of an individual. As per implicit strategists, strategic management is about reading the environment rightly to exploit opportunities contained within the environment and change the environment for those who follow. Emergent strategies on other hand are realized by patterns which are formed over a period of time, by iterative and selective process. (White, 2004; Mintzberg et al., 2005)

According to Johnson, Scholes and Whittington (2005),” Strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long term which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within a changing environment, to meet the needs of markets & fulfill stakeholder expectations.” Since 1960’s several notions of strategy led to formation of different strategy schools. Each of these schools had different interpretations of a firm’s situation and different assumptions of the strategy process that go with them. McKiernan (1996) and Mintzberg et al. (1998) came up with ten different schools of strategic management. Three prescriptive schools, i.e., Design, Planning and Positional as identified by Mintzberg have dominated the literature and practice. (Haberberg & Rieple, 2001; Senior & Fleming, 2006)

The Design school has had a big impact on the strategy formation process. Simplicity is the essence of this school. General

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