Defender Strategy versus Prospector Strategy

The corporate strategy of whether to be a defender or a prospector is always at the heart of debates at the board level. Miles and Snow (1978) define prospectors, as “organizations whom prime capability is that of finding and exploring new products and market opportunities”. In contrast, (Miles, Snow, Meyer, & Coleman Jr, 1978) defined defenders as “organizations that stress on operational efficiency and economics of scale”. This synopsis will compare the two strategies and use evidence from research journals to show which strategy is correct at the right time. This can be looked at through the organizational structure alignment and also the HR framework.

The “Alignment of Strategy with structure using management control system” journal article (Inamdar, 2012) shows that the decentralized structure follows inline with what he calls the prospectors strategy (Simons, 1990). This strategy makes the life of senior management easier because it helps improve formulating the corporate strategy, trading off competing needs among the business units and evaluating corporate and business unit performance because everything was in one central geographic location, and business leaders could meets often on a regular bases. While the defender strategy flows the centralized structure, which uses less intensively the management control system (Simons, 1990). The outcome of this is…