This paper discusses the concept of “ strategic anarchy” and how it can help in the strategy’s implementation. Strategic anarchy is an approach to strategy implementation which represents the extreme opposite of strategic engineering. Since under strategic engineering the strategy is formulated by senior management, strategic anarchy in contrast allows the front people to do any strategy formulation if there is any (Davenport, 2007) and implement accordingly. What happens as a result is that there is no clear process to follow and no performance measures to guide people under ‘ strategic anarchy’.
It does not mean however mean that strategic anarchy is no longer helpful in execution of strategies since this concept basically puts its trust on people who will implement the strategy. Since strategies, no matter how good, do not get implemented by themselves but requires people them to put into action, strategic anarchy then takes advantage by having front people who will know more how to interact with various customers and to deal with actual events in the real world.
Under strategic anarchy, people are ‘ extremely’ empowered since executives would even encourage their employees to bring out their entrepreneurial as well as innovative capabilities into realization. The employees are therefore presumed to know their jobs well and therefore they are fully trusted. Given such kind of culture in the environment the customers and employees are on top of the organization charts and they just make things happen for the company (Davenport, 2007).
Therefore, the strategy to be adopted and implemented varies with actual situation and employees can choose which will meet corporate objectives (Gable, 1998). Strategic anarchists however may turn the company into different directions if employees are not guide in one way or the other to what could have been done under strategic engineering. There must be therefore some sense to keep strategy in balance so that absolute anarchy will not happen in the organization.
