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This paper evaluates the effectiveness of two 'engineered' strategy processes--the Delphi method and scenario planning--against the simple process of plurality voting in facilitating organizational adaptation in four types of environments using stochastic processes simulation. By modeling the effect of these processes on managerial judgment using recent empirical findings, this paper makes several contributions to the strategy process literature. First, the models of Delphi and scenario planning provide precise definitions of a subset of effects these processes have on managerial judgment. Second, our results show that plurality voting outperforms Delphi and scenario planning in a wide range of environmental conditions, and thus attest to the virtue of this simple group process. Third, our results highlight environmental ambiguity and implementation costs as two important moderators of the relationship between strategy process and performance. They show that slower response yields superior results in hypercompetitive environments when ambiguity is high, and the choice between Delphi and scenario planning as the best process for turbulent environments is determined by implementation costs. Finally, the results reveal the circumstances in which Delphi and scenario planning, both resource-intensive processes, outperform plurality voting and are worth practicing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the tradeoffs in sourcing and sales strategies by considering them together as components of one end-to-end supply chain strategy. We compare four end-to-end strategies--combinations of offshore vs. near-shore sourcing and online vs. brick-and-mortar retailing--under various scenarios of the business environment by drawing insights from a numerical exercise. The key finding of this work is that sourcing and sales strategies are not completely modular: an ideal sales strategy can be influenced by the parameters of the sourcing strategy. Our analyses show that a change in a single dimension of the business environment--such as, the variation in geographic distribution of demand--can cause a supply chain strategy to get dominated by one conventionally thought to be its inferior. By identifying such conditions, our model sheds light on the scenarios in which the successful supply chain strategies pursued by firms today could become vulnerable to those considered inferior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]