Revolutionary Approach VS Evolutionary Approach

Managers deal with many challenging situations when positioning their organization one step ahead in competitive advantage. In order to achieve competitive success, every business organization strives to bring change that has a positive impact on the way the business process operates (Haberberg and Rieple 2008).

While many companies recognize the need for adopting strategic change, a few of them become successful in achieving sustainable long term competitive advantage by driving the impactful changes needed. When a new threat or opportunity arises in business processes, most of the time leaders tend to look through similar situation occurred in past and apply the same steps that worked in the past. But old practices of strategy implementation for new situations often may not be as effective as they were in the past. This consideration brings up an argument- which approach to take: evolutionary or revolutionary?


Revolutionary Approach

Evolutionary change is also called as incremental change as it’s a gradual or step by step process that takes place slowly to make sure that the organization becomes more endurable over time. Evolutionary change has often been taken by managers as they feel pressure from the external changing environment of the organization when addressing the needs of the stakeholders. Competition and the need of keeping pace with the newer technologies are some of the common factors that motivate managers to call evolutionary change from time to time. It is more of a collaborative approach. In evolutionary change approach, managers empower all their subordinates by providing them with all required resources, guidance, education and ability to help the change take better place within the organization. This helps the employees of the organization to get engaged and to contribute to the changing environment.


Evolutionary Approach

On the other hand, revolutionary approach is more of an insightful approach for change which is often taken intuitively by managers to meet the unforeseeable business perspectives. It is often called as transformational change because it is a complete renovation, redecoration as well as re-establishment of the business process which is often irretrievable. Revolutionary change restores a new alignment among the mission, vision and objective of an organization which leads to a deep-seated change in the internal and external environment as well as organizational behaviors. It is a radical change that occurs quickly comparing to evolutionary change.

The opportunity cost of taking revolutionary approach can sometimes be extremely high but the chances of failure to outcome the expected change is low. Therefore, in my opinion, to be able to adapt to all of the bigger changes within the organization’s environment, adopting revolutionary approach would be the right choice for a middle-size business that is getting prepared to achieve long term competitive advantage in baby care product industry.


Reference:
Haberberg, A. and Rieple, A. (2008) Strategic Management: Theory and Application, 5th ed. London: Chapman and Hall


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