In today’s globalized business world enterprises face increasing competition and accompanying internal and external threats that challenge their enterprise strategies. Multiple examples of enterprises show that long-lasting strategies need to be progressively overworked in order to secure competitiveness. One key for long-term competitiveness seems to lie in the ability to find a reasonable ratio of strategic stability and change. Neglecting the tension of strategic stability and change can have fatal consequences. Strategic management research increasingly focuses on this challenge. Lately research on ambidexterity and dynamic capability attempts to explain the underlying issues of proactively balancing strategic tensions in dynamic markets. Yet, there remain a couple of questions that – unanswered – limit the explanatory power of recent research models. Because of conceptual ambiguities around the concepts of ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, until now it remains unclear how a balance between strategic stability and change is reached and managed, and how the underlying strategic decision and strategic management processes at the organizational level look like. To address these open issues, this work develops an alternative framework of strategic ambidexterity. It is defined as a deliberate mechanism to detect, monitor, steer, coordinate and balance stability and change of the enterprise strategy. It argues that enterprises do not deal with strategic stability and change accidently. Quite on the contrary, the enterprises’ key actors are aware of this challenge and have a mechanism in place that allows them to deliberately and continuously employ the right ratio of strategic stability and change. This deliberate mechanism is assumed to create performance differences. High-performing enterprises have a particular setting of the mechanism that distinguishes them from low-performing peers and that secures their long-term competitiveness. In order to empirically test the mechanism a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using a sample of 74 mechanical engineering enterprises is performed. As will be shown there are in fact differences between high and low-performing enterprises. The strategic behavior of high-performing enterprises can be classified as Guided Long-Term Inclusive Planning (GLTIP). This work adds new knowledge to the research on ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities and also contributes to the methodological discussion on the analysis of sustainable competitive advantage in today’s globalized and dynamic markets.

In today’s globalized business world enterprises face increasing competition and accompanying internal and external threats that challenge their enterprise strategies. Multiple examples of enterprises show that long-lasting strategies need to be progressively overworked in order to secure competitiveness. One key for long-term competitiveness seems to lie in the ability to find a reasonable ratio of strategic stability and change. Neglecting the tension of strategic stability and change can have fatal consequences. Strategic management research increasingly focuses on this challenge. Lately research on ambidexterity and dynamic capability attempts to explain the underlying issues of proactively balancing strategic tensions in dynamic markets. Yet, there remain a couple of questions that – unanswered – limit the explanatory power of recent research models. Because of conceptual ambiguities around the concepts of ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, until now it remains unclear how a balance between strategic stability and change is reached and managed, and how the underlying strategic decision and strategic management processes at the organizational level look like. To address these open issues, this work develops an alternative framework of strategic ambidexterity. It is defined as a deliberate mechanism to detect, monitor, steer, coordinate and balance stability and change of the enterprise strategy. It argues that enterprises do not deal with strategic stability and change accidently. Quite on the contrary, the enterprises’ key actors are aware of this challenge and have a mechanism in place that allows them to deliberately and continuously employ the right ratio of strategic stability and change. This deliberate mechanism is assumed to create performance differences. High-performing enterprises have a particular setting of the mechanism that distinguishes them from low-performing peers and that secures their long-term competitiveness. In order to empirically test the mechanism a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using a sample of 74 mechanical engineering enterprises is performed. As will be shown there are in fact differences between high and low-performing enterprises. The strategic behavior of high-performing enterprises can be classified as Guided Long-Term Inclusive Planning (GLTIP). This work adds new knowledge to the research on ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities and also contributes to the methodological discussion on the analysis of sustainable competitive advantage in today’s globalized and dynamic markets.:1. Introduction 2. High-performing enterprises, strategic management and dynamic environments – multiple paths of explaining sustainable competitive advantage 3. Toward a multidimensional framework of balancing strategic stability and change: a steering mechanism 4. A comparative configurational analysis of the mechanism of strategic ambidexterity with regard to different performance settings 5. Discussion of results: introducing Guided Long-Term Inclusive Planning (GLTIP) 6. Management implications: GLTIP in action 7. Conclusions, limitations and directions for future research