Discovery and Coordination in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship

Strategic management, a discipline with its origins in the national and global expansion of business in the twentieth century, is a young discipline as business disciplines go. The founding event is often identified with the publication in 1962 of Chandler's Strategy and Structure, describing the growth of large businesses into new product areas and new markets, both across the United States and to a lesser extent abroad, and the organizational changes such expansion required. In this work, Chandler offers the first working definition of strategy: "the determination of the basic long term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals" (1962: 13). Implied in this and other managerial writing (reviewed more fully below) is that the task of strategy (or strategic management) actually contains two distinct tasks. The first focuses on the coordination of activities within the firm, preventing loss, and supervising the use of resources. The second focuses on identifying opportunity and mobilizing resources to take the firm in new directions with new capabilities, products, or markets.