Systems Thinking to the Study on Enterprise Strategy

摘要

In the past several decades, the jungle of the theories of strategy formation has come into being, which also bring some difficulties for strategy-makers to choose a proper one for their own companies in specific circumstances. This paper analyzes three kinds of complexity in strategic management. They are the organizational complexity, the environmental complexity and the cognitive complexity, which makes it impossible to find a universal research methodology of strategy formation for all enterprises. It also means that we must employ systems thinking, a powerful tool to deal with complexity, to the whole process of strategy formation and use different methodology for different problem situations of strategy. We conclude that there are three levels of systems thinking, that is, philosophy, methodology and method, influencing factors/elements and their relations. A true systems thinker should tolerate different beliefs, world views, employ different methodologies and methods to different problem situations and try to master relations among the elements of the whole system dynamically. Based on the above analysis, this paper further suggests three principles of systems methodology for the research on strategy. The essence of meta-synthesis methodology will be instructive for us to build up research methodology for enterprise strategy.