Deep Dive

The actions of top management are seldom the unit of analysis in empirical strategy research on complex organizations. Yet, the behaviors of top executives are frequently featured as an important determinant in historical treatments of strategic change inside large firms. Theories of organizational ecology, ambidexterity, and punctuated change do not provide explanations consistent with these historical accounts. This paper, by examining the resource allocation process closely, identifies a specific set of circumstances in which intervention by top management is critical to a firm's ability to adopt new ways of behaving and thereby to realize a new strategy. In these cases, top management must seize hold of the substantive content of the new strategy as well as its operational implementation - a top-down intervention we call deep dive - in order to overcome barriers to change that manifest in a wide range of organizational routines and behavioral norms, previously fostered by the established structural context of the firm. We illustrate this model of corporate intervention with a case study in which a high-performing firm seeks to shift its performance trajectory into new dimensions.