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Introduction
The Business Policy field was founded at the start of the 20th century (Rumelt, Schendel, & Teece, 1994; Hambrick & Chen, 2008) and strategic management was formally born in the 1960s (Amitabh, 2010), when Chandler (1962), Ansoff (1965) and Learned, Christensen, Andrews, & Guth (1965) published their pioneering books. Since then, strategic management has gone through several stages (Ansoff, Declerck, & Hayes, 1976; O'Shannassy, 2001), taken many forms (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 1998) and changed profoundly. One of the most challenging and unresolved problems in this area is the 'apparently high' percentage of organisational strategies that fail, with some authors estimating a rate of failure between 50 and 90% (e.g., Kiechel, 1982, 1984; Gray, 1986; Nutt, 1999; Kaplan & Norton, 2001; Sirkin, Keenan, & Jackson, 2005). By failure we mean either a new strategy was formulated but not implemented, or it was implemented but with poor results. This is a simple definition but still consistent with the three features of a successful implementation as defined by Miller (1997): (1) completion of everything intended to be implemented within the expected time period; (2) achievement of the performance intended; and (3) acceptability of the method of implementation and outcomes within the organisation. It is also consistent with the planned and emergent strategy modes. In both strategy modes, strategy may or may not be completed, may achieve different degrees of performance and its acceptability may also vary.
The difficulty of successfully implementing new business strategies has long been recognised in the literature (e.g., Alexander, 1985; Wernham, 1985; Ansoff & McDonnell, 1990), and a 1989 Booz Allen study (cited by Zairi, 1995) concluded that most managers believe that the difficulty of implementing strategy surpasses that of formulating it. As an example, the study found that 73% of managers believed that implementation is more difficult than formulation; 72% that it takes more time; and 82% that it is the part of the strategic planning process over which managers have least control.
In order to understand the reasons behind failure and improve the success rate of implementation, several researchers have provided comprehensive sets of implementation difficulties (Alexander, 1985; Wernham, 1985; Ansoff & McDonnell, 1990; O'Toole, 1995; Beer & Eisenstat, 2000; Cândido & Morris, 2000; Hafsi, 2001; Miller, Wilson, & Hickson,...