- In project-based industries the link between process and industry is very apparent, but creative industries are also a fruitful subject for the study of process
- Professor Lampel moved from looking at project-based industries to looking at creative industries because creative industries are a very unusual, if "frustrating", research subject
- Projects with theatrical elements, or technological dramas, are evident in most industries and at most levels, and Professor Lampel has directed his efforts towards researching field-configuring events
- Professor Lampel is currently researching event-based strategising, or the adaptation of organisations' strategies as the business environment changes
- Professor Lampel is also co-authoring a book to be published soon, called Management is Not What You Think, which aims to tackle some of the "conventional views" on management
Q&A transcript:
Dr Bhalla: Where do you see your work positioned in the field of strategy?
Professor Lampel: When I started out doing work in strategy, the key division was between so-called content and process. Content dealt primarily with what organisations do - what kind of products they have, markets, et cetera - whereas process dealt with how they developed a strategy. And I was very interested in industry-level phenomena, I am interested in how industries evolve and how companies move within industries as they change. From this point of view, actually I was more interested in process than content, even though people who work on that level tend to be more content. So my fascination from early on was how to look at how organisations make decisions, against the background of the way industries change.
Q: You have been working a lot on creative industries over the last number of years, and so to what extent do you see your work on creative industries reflect this orientation?
A: The choice of creative industries was, to some extent, an accident, rather than by design. Originally, as I will speak about in a while, I looked at project-based industries as a place where you could clearly see the relationship between process and industry, because projects in some ways link the way an organisation does business internally with its position externally. The decision-making mix, when it comes to choosing a project or the way to execute a project, tells you a lot about organisational processes. But gradually, as I began to broaden the scope beyond an initial emphasis on projects, ... I began to look at the film industry as a very interesting case study of project-based industries. And their process made a lot of sense because, to understand how these organisations evolve and how they position themselves in an environment, you really have to look at process rather than from the classic content perspective. So my work there led me to a greater interest in creative industries for their own sake, because I was really fascinated with what they are like. I mean their characteristics are very unusual: creativity, their reliance on talent, networks, the high degree of ambiguity, the need to make sense of situations when you do not know exactly what is going to appeal to the customer, et cetera. All those things together made a very interesting research side. Interesting, but I must say also frustrating. After that I expanded to music, fragrance, and now even old couture, so I am doing work on all those industries together.
Q: So project-based industries, creative industries, fashion and events, which is something I have been reading your work on. To what extent do you see your work on events as a unifying concept of all this varied mix of different industries?
A: I think in a way I came to generalising my work beyond projects. I began to get very interested in events as moments of this continued to an evolution of organisation industries, which tells us a lot about the way strategy develops. Originally, this came about by looking at projects, but from projects, looking at technology, I did some work on what I call technological dramas. Technological dramas are instances where entrepreneurs, investors, try to launch new products using theatrical methods. A very famous proponent or practitioner of that is Steve Jobs, who is very famous as somebody who stages these extraordinary theatrical events for launching his products, more recently, for instance, the iPhone. Now my work on that came to the attention of Alan Meyer at the University of Oregon. He was working on nanotechnology. He was working on something similar, but in a different context in technology. He was looking at the way in which trade shows, industry association meetings, professional meetings et cetera basically also bring together resources, individuals, and create certain dramatological ritualistic elements, by which everybody meets everybody and there are certain social structures, and this tends to change the industry or the field in which they operate. We came together and eventually we decided to push this agenda forward in the form of a special issue of the Journal of Management Studies on field-configuring events, and that came out this year and has been well received, and I think has made quite an impact. There we looked at a variety of field-configuring events, whether in technology, whether it is in professional services, whether it is in sports.
Q: You are an academic who does not really fit in the classic academic sense. You not only talk to fellow academics in your research, but you are also talking very much to managers, and you have published a number of books just targeted right at managers. Where do you see your research going forward in the future?
A: I mean I like to believe that I am both a researcher, I pursue the research track, and that more and more I am trying to target my research directly at managers. And I think the two are not mutually exclusive, to be certain there is a way in which they meet at some point. So, for instance, I talked about learning from rare events, I am currently in the process of enlarging that agenda to look at what I call event-based strategising. Event-based strategising really is the view that organisations often shift their strategies, both deliberately and in an emergent way, as a result of events that happen in the environment. So they either respond or mobilise events to shift those strategies. We are, right now, undergoing a tremendous environmental upheaval which really shows that, in institutions such as banks and financial institutions which have been relatively stable in their strategies for a very long time, some of them are as old as 100 years, and yet they are having to respond to those events. So this is a research direction that we are pushing, again I'm talking about Jamal Shamsie in the case of learning from rare events, and also Bill Starr of the University of Oregon, who has worked on the Shuttle accidents in NASA, and who is also coming to join us and we are going to do some work on that. Hopefully that is going to become a wider movement, and re-examine some of the foundations of strategy. Finally, we are working on a book which is supposed to come out very soon called Management is Not What You Think, and, again, it is really targeted at practitioners. It is an attempt to make managers think more critically and more effectively about what it is they do as managers, in other words to reject some of the conventional views and begin to realise that, in many ways, to be a good manager is a matter of maturity, both intellectual and emotional. And those provocative pieces, some of them are more critical pieces, hopefully will achieve that and obviously we are hoping for another bestseller.
