Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation

Abstract Strategists are encouraged to identify sustained competitive advantages. This volume takes a different tact and provides a perspective on how organizations adapt over time to changing circumstances. This process is characterized as not driven by the inspired wisdom of a grand strategist, but by an ecology of initiatives within the organization. A central role of the organization is to mediate between the market forces in which it operates and the culling and amplification of these initiatives within the organization. In this spirit, a useful touchstone is that of Mendel, who sits intermediate between the blind watchmaker of a purely Darwinian process and a “chess master” strategist as suggested by stylized rational choice approaches. The “Mendelian executive” operates with intentionality, but this intentionality is with respect to the design of the experimental process rather than the identification of specific pathways forward. The two core conceptual pillars of the work are that of path-dependence, what are the adjacent “spaces” to which an organization might move, and “artificial selection,” how the organization mediates aggregate immediate outcomes and the allocation of resources and rewards to the various initiatives and actors within the organization. Entities that have a sustained lifespan are not static, but engage in processes of renewal, whether cells in the human body or lines of business within a firm. A conceptual framework is provided to illuminate some of the fundamental mechanisms underlying this process.