It can be difficult to know which environmental changes are relevant to an emergent or incremental strategy, and can lead to acting upon the wrong changes or acting in the wrong way, although incremental strategies avoid major errors by changing past practices gradually. Because incremental strategies are changed so gradually, they are not suitable when a radical new approach is necessary, an emergent strategy would be more suitable in this situation.
As Riley's Autoroutes Ltd is in need of a major strategic overhaul, this suggests an emergent strategy would be appropriate, however, making lots of drastic changes to the company straight away would be risky. An incremental strategy would not be drastic enough as changes have to be made immediately. We decided the best strategic approach would be a cross between emergent strategy and logical incrementalism. The emergent strategy because the company has consistently followed the same pattern of behaviour for a number of years which it is now going to change, and logical incrementalism because the company will need to continue implementing new strategies and objectives gradually over time.
Next, we looked at what the company wanted to achieve and devised a vision and a mission statement. Vision: "Our vision is to become a leading European haulage company whilst retaining our long standing reputation and values" Becoming a leading European haulage company is the reason the consultants were called in so that was an obvious statement to put in the vision, but we decided that the old values of the company should not be ignored as they are what made it what it is today.
When we devised the mission statement we thought about what the main purpose of the organisation was, and what they needed to do to satisfy their customers and came up with this mission statement: "At Riley's Autoroutes our experiences team strive to provide a reliable, high quality and cost effective haulage service to all our customers".
