Chapter 9: Sense and Sensibility in Managerial Advice

Long-term survival of firms is inextricably linked to their economic performance. Traditionally, managers were expected to plan their firm’s survival by selecting and implementing appropriate business strategies, given the firm’s strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats in its environment (Learned, Christensen, Andrews, & Guth, 1969). Managers were thus seen as able to control their firm’s survival by making appropriate rational strategic choices and linking appropriate means to economic ends. Increasingly recognized, however, is that survival depends on means beyond immediate managerial control, such as the innovative and creative abilities of the firm’s employees (Stewart, 1997), intersubjective sensemaking (Peters & Waterman, 1982), tacit knowledge and group learning (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), personal involvement and relationships (Goleman, 1996; Senge, 1990), and commitment and trust (O’Malley, 2000; Zand, 1997). What all these factors have in common is their embeddedness and embodiment in the dispositions, orientations and, in a word, sensibilities of organizational members.