Sustainability and Talent Management: Two Important Emerging Areas of Strategic Management

Abstract

Strategic Management has grown in stature in practice, thought and education. This seems almost a truism considering the number of books on the topic, growth of courses in the area, use of strategy metaphors in common practitioner parlance, extent of crossfertilization between Strategy and other management disciplines and functional areas as evidenced, for instance, by proliferation of courses such as Strategic Marketing or IT Strategies etc. It is, therefore, important for management thinkers to step back and identify key emerging areas within Strategic Management. I would even say – perhaps at the cost of being charged of being prejudicial – that the key areas in Strategic Management are indeed the harbingers of what would be key emerging areas of Management itself. De Wit and Meyer (2000) locate all Strategy discourse in four major themes: Context, Purpose, Content and Process. Context deals with the environment that a firm faces. It has everything to do with the dynamism and uncertainty caused by globalization, technology, demographic trends etc. It is the ontological reality faced by the organization. Purpose connects the external and the internal. Purpose sets the internals in the light of the given externals. It is the organization’s raison d’etre, the very reason for its existence. Purpose plays the role of conjoining the external and the internal. The final two themes, that may be termed internal to the organization are Content and Process themes. The theme of Content relates to the state in which the firm is or would like to be. It may have to do with what is or what ought to be. To achieve the ends we finally have the Process theme which relates to the means the firm adopts or could adopt to achieve the desired end results. The ends and the means – Content and Process - together form the firm’s internal landscape. To further elucidate, “Content” deals with the “what is” and “what ought to be” (or in other words, existing end states and desired end states) and “Process” deals with the “how” of things (or, in other words, means). Following the same authors I alluded to earlier, viz., Dewit and Meyer - and informed by strategy thinkers like Mason and Mitroff (1981) and social scientists like Hofstede (1993) - we see that conceptual