Deep dives

About this book

The inability of established firms to make necessary and obvious changes has been a topic of repeated scholarly inquiry. Compared to new entrants, large firms often encounter difficulties in formulating and committing changes due to the complexity in firms' activities. Beyond cognitive limitations, perhaps the most intriguing type of failure is when managers fully understand the nature of the required change, and the company has already developed the relevant capabilities, but the formation of a new set of core activities is still inhibited. Taking a micro-perspective, the paper argues that there are situations where direct top-down interventions are necessary. Termed as 'deep dives', they are interventions targeting implementation of radical routines and resource configuration. Structural arrangements, pre-set change routines, and existing decisional priorities are insufficient to fashion relevant capabilities into new core activities. Ad-hoc problem solving is the key. The paper concludes with a case study, which illustrates how deep dives guide the formation of a set of new core activities in the variation-selection-retention process.