"Overcoming focal behavioral failures" (parte I)

"to identify the behavioral drivers of superior performance systematically, it is useful to reason against the benchmark of market efficiency. When markets are efficient, opportunities for superior performance (also called superior courses of action or strategic opportunities) do not exist, or, if they do, they are short-lived because they are competed away by many rival firms. Therefore, establishing what causes violations of market efficiency shows what causes opportunities to exist. Following this logic, the behavioral roots of superior opportunities can be understood in terms of behavioral factors that hinder efficiency. The theory proposed in this paper seeks to isolate such factors by identifying systematic behavioral bounds or impediments to competition. These bounds are behavioral in that they reflect limitations in strategic leaders’ ability to manage mental processes. They will be called behavioral failures, short for behavioral market failures. Such failures ensure that opportunities whose pursuit requires leaders to manage very hard-tomanage mental processes are not competed away, even if competition is intense. Hence, superior performance rests in part on a strategic leader’s superior ability to overcome focal behavioral failures.
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Superior opportunities tend to be cognitively distant, and critical sources of superior performance lie in strategic leaders’ superior ability to overcome the behavioral bounds that make it hard for the average firm to pursue them. This proposition does not imply that local opportunities do not exist or that “persistent performance differentials among seemingly similar enterprises” do not exist or are negligible.
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The proposition does, however, affirm that cognitively distant opportunities are likely to be less contested than more proximate ones are and are therefore potentially more rewarding. For this reason, the strategic leader’s role should be regarded as more expansive than is commonly acknowledged, provided that what is entailed to exercise it reliably can be understood.
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Thus, in heavily competitive environments, existing superior opportunities tend to be those that most firms have an especially hard time pursuing. The difficulty of pursuing them therefore isolates them from competition. It will be shown that central to this limitation are behavioral failures: mental processes that the average strategic leader has a hard time managing. On the one hand, these failures play an important role to the existence of superior opportunities; on the other hand, a superior ability to counter them results in superior performance."

Trechos retirados de "Toward a Behavioral Theory of Strategy" de Giovanni Gavetti, publicado por Organization Science - Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 2012, pp. 267–285