This vital series of works marks a lifetime of profound contribution by Professor Ming-Jer Chen of the Darden School of the University of Virginia, one of the world's great scholars of strategy. In this collection, Ming-Jer Chen has provided insight into vital topics in strategic management scholarship and practice. More importantly, he tells us what it takes to lead a life of socially responsible academic research and teaching, and lays bare the core elements of what it takes to become a reflective and moral business practitioner.
Ming-Jer has devoted his life to and served as a role model in all of these spheres. Happily, his pathbreaking contributions are highlighted in each of the three thematic works in this important collection, which no doubt will serve as classics in strategic wisdom for scholars and managers alike for many decades to come. Please let me say a little about each of the volumes in the collection.
In the first volume of this series Passing the Baton: Becoming a Renaissance Management Scholar, Professor Chen highlights the poverty of an exclusive and excessive focus only on research, teaching, or practice. He argues for the integral connections among these vital areas of society, namely, scholarship, instruction and the conduct of management. More importantly, he demonstrates their essential complementary and synergy among these domains. In so doing, he vividly demonstrates that the pursuit of any one single path hobbles its relevance, rigour and depth. The importance of complementarity has been neglected by too many academics who have failed to become informed by real world challenges and developments, and have failed thereby to enrich and in turn become enriched by their university classroom and executive education experiences. It has also been ignored by too many managers who are so focussed on the day to day tasks at hand that they neglect to learn from more conceptually fundamental strategic insights and thereby fail to “see the forest for the trees”. Using poignant real-world and personal examples and deep perspective, Ming-Jer Chen shows how “becoming a Renaissance management scholar” can bridge the current chasms that exist between teaching and research, and research and practice, thereby enlightening all three domains. In so doing he raises the bar for all of us working in academic research, instruction, and executive practice.
In the second volume of this series, Competitive Dynamics: Competitive Advantage in the Post-Porter Era, Professor Chen traces a scholarly trajectory of evolution, beginning with his roots as one of the primary founders of competitive dynamics. Before the advent of the competitive dynamics perspective, research in strategy was static, too far removed from the realities and give and take of true rivalry——of competitive action and response.In pioneering this critical area of research, Professor Chen, along with his colleagues, significantly advanced strategic thinking and practice. He initiated research into hitherto neglected competitive repertoires——and the contextual sources and performance consequences the simplicity, inertia, and conformity characterizing such multifaceted repertoires. In so doing, he and his colleagues have derived important insights into the nature of functional and dysfunctional organizational learning, imitation, and change.
In later work, based in part on an expectancy-valence perspective, Professor Chen developed his Awareness-Motivation-Capability model which was to serve as a foundational framework for legions of competitive dynamics scholars. The widespread influence of this model stemmed not only from its elegance and predictive power, but also because it reconciled the two dominant, but seemingly disparate, strategic perspectives of the day: Porterian competitive analysis and the ever-popular resource-based-view.
Ming-Jer then worked to update this model by proposing a more long-term oriented relational approach, taking the field of head-to-head competition from a transactional portrayal of dual opponents, to a longer-term relational perspective encompassing a far wider range of stakeholders——employees, customers, suppliers, and the community at large. At the present time, Ming-Jer's work in competitive dynamics is indispensable to those who wish to be both scholars and practitioners of effective strategic competition.
The field of management scholarship in much of the world has been dominated by a Western viewpoint and perspective——one of supposed competition, creative destruction and meritocracy, but also one of rivalry over cooperation, transactions over relationships, and short-term versus long-term thinking——in short, a rather narrow, winner-takes all logic. At an opposite end of the spectrum, Asian management scholarship and practice has tended towards a broader, longer-term, more relational perspective——but also sometimes one of paternalism, familial favoritism, and even cronyism.
In the third volume of this series, Ambiculturalism: Strategic Middle-Way Thinking for the Modern World, Ming-Jer Chen presents a model that embraces the best of both worlds while avoiding its less salutary aspects. He outlines in revealing detail a middle way that avoids the excesses, but exploits the advantages, of both Eastern and Western thought as they apply not only to strategic thinking, but to life itself. In so doing he celebrates the “power of one”——the necessity to integrate, reflect, reconcile, and think more deeply about the underlying multifaceted tensions and characteristics underlying human conduct, and fundamental humanity. Ming-Jer Chen thereby brings to Asian and Western scholars alike, a foundation for enriching their scholarly and practical contributions.
I cannot recommend this work more highly for students, professors, and managers at all levels to help them become more effective and more relevant in their lifelong strategic pursuits, very broadly defined.
Danny Miller
HEC Montreal
Montreal, March 2020
[1] 后附此推薦序的英文版Preface of “Selected Works of Ming-Jer Chen”。