BID Seminar: Skilled practical coping: A non-cognitive model of collective behaviour in firms.

Economics

Speaker:	Dr Ajit Nayak, Senior Lecturer, Management Studies
Date:	Tuesday 15 March 2016
Time:	12:30 pm
Location:	Marchant Syndicate Room, A, Building: one

Further details

Why did Polaroid fail to respond to the digital camera revolution? Why did Xerox fail to see the potential of Graphic User Interface (GUI) that Steve Jobs later exploited at Apple? What are the reasons behind Nokia’s spectacular fall from being a leader in the mobile phone industry to exit in 5 years? Put more generally, why do top management teams of large organizations struggle to adapt to changing environments? In order to answer these questions, strategy scholars have posited the need to develop dynamic capabilities – the capability to change existing resources and routines in an organization. In this session, I present a non-cognitive framework for understanding dynamic capabilities. I draw on terms such as ‘fast and frugal heuristics’, ‘hot cognition’, ‘habitus’, ‘body incorporation’ and ‘skilled practical coping’ to explain collective adaptive behaviour. Perhaps the failure of large firms to adapt lies in the over-emphasis on cognition and deliberate thinking that aims to analyse and formulate strategies.