Strategic and competitive success: towards a model of the comprehensively competent organization

Draws together a number of themes from mainstream strategy literature and synthesizes them into a new model of the comprehensively competent organization. Argues that it is a key role of the strategic leader to ensure that his/her organization possesses a wide range of generic competences (to an appropriate degree in each case) in order that the organization can develop and sustain more specific competences in learning, change management and product/service competitive competency. These “layers of competence” are illustrated in the form of an integrated web. While it is content competences which ultimately produce successful competitive outcomes, other competences in learning and change management are needed to support this. The competence implications of modern environments are discussed and, towards the end of the article, the generic competence argument is applied to the literature on business failure.