Infocom analysis

Example of continuous learning in strategy-making

Eric Gagné who won the Cy Young in 2003 was far from a great top professional potential player in his first junior level years (I played against him and studied baseball in high school with him). The guy was good but definitely not a top " prospect". However, the guy kept improving and improving each year, at each level and finally found his perfect job for his own style: closer and "Game over man" in the major league, while he was always a starting pitcher. His coach said that since he reached its top performance at such a young age (26) he may become the best closer of the history. Baseball is a sport full of strategies and of "emerging strategies". Managers from corporations may gain insights from such examples. Even without the best conditions (playing baseball in Canada or having restricted resources) a company may use a strategy of continuous learning with the long term goal of achieving excellence in its own specialty.

Eric has only three sort of pitches in its arsenal, but he learned how to use it in the right context, against the right adversary and adjusting it according to its own performance of the day : he incrementally learned how to tailor its pitching strategies against the top baseball players in the world, for the last inning of the game. A company must deeply knows its strengths and weaknesses and commits its collective efforts toward the achievement of excellence in its field. Strategy-making in infocom industries must be tailored according to the context and the momentum in the industry, until the firm learns where it can really make a difference for its customers. If the name of the game in baseball is pitching, the name of the game in infocom industries strategy-making is getting positive network externalities. A way to help corporations develop and nurture individual and organizational learning (and better understanding of network externalities opportunities and threats) is through the use of a corporate university. We will see the strategic importance of corporate universities compared to simple Training centres in our next comment in the Weblog.