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Culture of experimentation and future of strategy

Tom Davenport posted on his Harvard Business School Publishing blog his view on the future of strategy. He stresses the importance of experimentation:

A Culture of Experimentation and Learning

A company focused on entrepreneurial execution would have a culture based on experimentation and learning, so that no major strategy or initiative is undertaken without extensive testing, the use of a control group, and other aspects of the scientific method. In this sort of culture, any particular strategy, process design, or performance metric is only a hypothesis about how the world works. It should be tested and confirmed on a small scale before proceeding to the large scale initiative. Capital One, for example, undertakes more than 60,000 experiments a year in credit card marketing and other financial offerings. Toyota is also known for its culture of experimentation and learning.

Entrepreneurial execution is an effective compromise between the overly deterministic approach of strategic engineering, and the overly chaotic approach of strategic anarchy. Indeed, this approach may be the only one that can help large organizations succeed in the long run while harnessing the intellect and passion of employees in support of larger goals.
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