Managing change strategically: the technical, political, and cultural keys.

The turbulent economic, political, and cultural forces of the 1980s have made the management of strategic change increasingly a way of life for organizations. To manage such change, managers will have to confront basic questions about the organization's technical, political, and cultural foundations. The technical questions include: What business(es) should we be in? How should we be organized to accomplish our strategy? What kinds of people do we need, and how will they be acquired, developed, and rewarded? The political questions include: Who gets to influence the mission and strategy of the organization? Who gets promoted to what key positions? The cultural questions: What values and beliefs are necessary to support the organization's strategy? What subcultures are desirable, and should there be an overarching corporate culture? The author suggests that the answers for an individual organization should cluster to form three strands of a strategic rope--that is, they must be interwoven and mutually supportive for the organization to be effective. He sees human resources management as the focal point of much of strategic change likely to occur in organizations during the 1980s.