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314 CHAPTER 9 • THE PRoCEss of oPERATions sTRATEgy – foRmulATion And imPlEmEnTATion

maintaining alignment over time

Most organisations are as mortal as the people who create and run them. So why are
those firms that last for many years the exception rather than the rule? Most new
business ventures fail to make it past their first year. The obvious explanation is that
firms fail to reconcile market requirements and operations resources because it is all
too easy either to misinterpret customer requirements, or fail to develop the requisite
operational capabilities. At the same time, history is littered with companies that had
their moment of competitive glory but then faded or disappeared forever. They may
have effectively reconciled operational resources and market requirements to achieve
alignment at one point in time. Yet, subsequently, they failed to sustain this position.
And while many other factors, such as macroeconomic shifts and exchange rate fluc-
tuations, have a huge influence on the success of organisations, the ongoing battle
to reconcile resources and requirements to achieve sustainable alignment is clearly
of great importance. This emphasises the idea that operations strategy formulation
should not be a one-off event. Strategies will be formed repeatedly over time in order
to take into account changes in both operations resources and market requirements.
At each of these ‘formulation episodes’ (which may be both frequent and informal),
a key objective is likely to be the retention of ‘alignment’. Sometimes this will mean
maintaining alignment during an increase in both operations resource capabilities and
market requirements. More realistically, even the most successful long-running firms
will experience differing degrees of alignment between market requirements and their
operational resources.

Time and timing
Firms such as Intel and Dell in the computer industry might, at any point in time, pos-
sess a significant design and manufacturing performance advantage over their com-
petitors. Unfortunately, in their hyper-competitive markets the danger is that their
advantage will be quickly ‘competed away’, with sustainability sometimes measured
in months rather than years. Jeffrey Williams published a study of sustainability pat-
terns in a range of industries. He proposed a model that classifies capability-based
2
advantages according to how fast they can be duplicated. Nothing lasts forever, and
competitive success inevitably attracts imitators who offer superior product features
or lower prices. Yet, it is also clear that some organisations are able to sustain the
advantages of their products and services for much longer than others. For instance,
throughout the 1990s in the PC industry, why was it that certain products such as
Microsoft’s Office Suite of programs were highly stable, with functionality and prices
essentially unchanged during more than ten years, whereas physical products sold by
Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Apple and so on, could last less than one year? In attempting
to explain these and other differing patterns of sustainability, the following typology
of resource life cycles offers some interesting insights. 3

Slow cycle
Products and services in this class (Microsoft Word, British Airways flights through
Heathrow) reflect resource positions that are strongly shielded from competitive pres-
sures by mechanisms that are durable and enduring. In economic terms, such resources
exploit scarcity characteristics that are derived from factors that are impossible (or

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