Strategic Decision-Making in the Entrepreneurial Millennium: Competition, Crisis and “Expert” Risk Assessment of Emerging Market Sovereigns

This chapter examines strategic decision-making by expert organizations during periods of increased competitive and environmental turbulence. It is a rather low-risk prediction that an entrepreneurial millennium will see decisions affecting the very survival of organizations made less often in the cool, objective context that dominant market positioning and environmental placidness and predictability engender. Instead, decision-making in this emerging world assumes inherent instability, frequent change, and constant scanning for threats from rivals. Reliance on stable industry structures and corporate competencies is problematic. Existing structures favoring incumbents in one period crumble in the next, leaving in the rubble confused incumbents prone to challenge from newcomers. Internal corporate knowledge bases can be rendered obsolete or even misleading in this new environment. If there are persistently successful firms in this world, then they must be flexible enough to look within the firm for expertise on key decisions in one instance but then also look without to others linked by market and or network relationships.