Overview
Technology has changed the way we live and operate, in this new era organisations are faced with an increasingly globalised and hyper-competitive market. In order to survive organisations need to learn how to foresee and respond to rapid, volatile, discontinuous change.
Introduction
The aim of this paper is to discuss and outline the concept of rapid, volatile, discontinuous change and the effect that discontinuities have in the Strategic Management of today’s companies.
This paper will firstly introduce the concept of rapid, volatile discontinuous change, followed by identifying how this concept fits within the Strategic Management process. We will also discuss which model is used to identify discontinuous change.
Finally, we will discuss a couple of case studies of companies where their CEOs have been faced with discontinuities in their industry and how their top management responded to the change in the market and whether it resulted in success or failure.
The concept of rapid, volatile, discontinuous change
Today’s organisational environments are faced with many challenges, external and internal forces are constantly increasing the pressure of companies to transform themselves to be able to adapt to our overly changing world. However, from time to time organisations are faced with challenges that occur so abruptly and extensively that it affects entire industries; and overwhelms their capacity to adapt and respond to the market conditions (Meyer, Brooks, & Goes, 1990). This cataclysmic change is known as “discontinuous change”, these types of abruptions are by nature unpredictable; it represents a complete disruption from the past way of doing things. We cannot predict these types of changes based on past experiences because these changes are completely unexpected (Handy, 1990).
The creation and implementation of new technology has facilitated the merging of new ideas, process and new politics which are constantly re-shaping on a large and...