Clasificación: Estrategia

Attain Sustainable Competitive Advantages by means of Organizational Learning

Por: M Sc. GUILLERMO A. Ronda Pupo, Professor at Enterprises Management Research Center at University of Holguín, Cuba.
gronda@ict.uho.edu.cu o guillermo.ronda@uho.edu.cu

The realization of the strategic diagnosis -SWOT analysis- has been generalized to formulate a strong coherent integrated strategy for any company. It contributes to the alignment and objectivity of the formulated strategy concerning the strategic position defined.

After having known the strategic position of the firm, a valuable initial information is already possessed. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to obtain more details, such as: the performance of the best firms in the industry, in such a way that the firm would be in a position to know the strongest competitors' capacities and learn from them. This knowledge will open up opportunities to make a decision: either to equal or to surpass the performance of the target firm. This process will enlarge the intellectual potencialities of the firm. The strategic business units reach the success key factors, and acquire sustainable competitive advantages.

Appropriate strategies for the management of knowledge is indispensable so that a company can compete in an effective way. The markets globalization, the intense technological evolution, and the trends toward deregulation have changed the rules of the game in industry. In this new context, the traditional sources of competitive advantage of companies, like physical and financial assets have stopped providing sustainable differentiation, because they are available to all the agents that compete in the industry. For this reason, the development of core capacities to learn from the strongest most developed firms turns into a necessity. These distinctive core capacities should be difficult to assimilate by competitors, and are mostly based on the core competencies of personnel, and in the way strategic process rules the future of the enterprise.

The management of intellectual capital is important as a base for the development of organizational core capacities. This development implies, without any doubt, the daily process of learning, individual and/or collective. The outcome of this process is the ever-growing need of the firms to manage its organizational knowledge and to measure its intellectual capital.

To obtain this, the problem should be focused within the field of strategic management, as a further step of the model. Up to now, this aspect has been absent in the strategic management models, even in the Balance Score Card, which is, among all, one of the best.

Several authors like Kaplan and Norton (1996) and more recently Arjona (1999) have worried about the analysis of the intangible assets from strategic management. The pattern Intellect of "Measurement of Intellectual Capital" (Euroforum, 1998), developed by the University Institute Euroforum Escorial in 1998 relates the intellectual capital of the enterprises with the process of strategic management.

The concern for the intangible assets inside the field of study of strategic management is justified in that, traditionally, the competitiveness of the companies has been explained by its relative position regarding its competitors in two parameters: differentiation and cost; but nowadays, a third parameter has appeared: the intellectual capital/ knowledge (the intangible assets), as the fundamental base of creating sustainable competitive advantages. The question is: What role do intangible assets carry out in the competitive advantages obtained by companies?

The assets that have been kept in mind are usually those that can be measured clearly, the physical assets (Jacobson, 1992). Other authors like Imai and Roehl (1987) have highlighted the importance of the intangible assets for the creation of sustainable competitive advantages in the time.

The effects of tangible assets have been traditionally overestimated in the study of the profitability of companies. The tangible assets have a much reduced explanatory capacity (Jacobson, 1992). Many other studies reach the same conclusion. Therefore, it seems clear that the fundamental differences among the companies are explained thanks to the study of their intangible assets, as their investment in research and development, or the form of being related with their clients and employees.

The organizational learning is "a process that uses the knowledge and the understanding guided to the improvement of the actions" (Fiol and Lyles 1995), the same one has its base in the theory of the contingency.

Learning here starts on the identification of the most advanced firms and on a comparison of how they achieve that performance and how it is achieved by our enterprise to reach to the learning strategy.

In the literature on this topic, it is appreciated that the authors are left in the theoretical field without contributing with tools that really facilitate to the firms to use learning easily, in order to improve performance and achieve the necessary coherence and integration with the rest of the strategic process. In this sense, Dr. Wilde Llanes outlines "To know, to study and to learn how the best enterprises make things without coping mechanically neither to extrapolate forms, nor concepts and measures. It is the fundamental element of the benchmarking. It is more relevant to investigate its concrete results, because the most important thing is to appropriate the positive experiences of the best firms, but in a creative and innovative way. Tat is to say, overcoming them on the base of what has been learned, without copying neither transferring solutions mechanically from place to place."

To achieve the above mentioned, the author of the present work proposes the Learning Matrix (see figure 1) for which is recommended to use the following procedures:

1. To define the key factors or Strategic Business Unit to improve its performance.

2. Identification of the most advanced firms in the sector.

3. To obtain information from those advanced firms

Such identification could be:

• In the international environment.

• In the national environment.

• In the competition industry.

1. To measure the performance of our enterprise respect to the most advanced firms.

1. To measure the performance of the firm with the performance of the target company.

2. To establish the learning gap.

1. To define the desired status.

• To equal the performance of the target firm.

• To surpass the performance of the target firm

Advantages of the employment of this method

1. It helps to integrate the mission, vision, objectives, and strategies in function of achieving the target of the firm.

2. It offers a point of reference on how to elevate the general performance of the company, of one, several key factors, or of strategic business units.

3. It contributes to elevate the motivation of the members of the firm by means of the challenge to achieve goals.
4. It favors the commitment, the cohesion, and the sense of ownership when working in the firm, and for the company.

5. It helps to maintain the organizational management.

6. It allows the positive experiences reached by the advanced firms to generalize and to be implemented with minimum costs.

7. It is possible to center the attention in the internal and external aspects of the firm, which improves the strategic thought of the business leaders, not only of the strategic apex of the leadership but also of the half line cadres.

The Learning Matrix