Shoaling (School of Fish) as Competitive Strategy

Managers of established firms as well as emerging firms continually search for unique strategies that ensure better returns with minimal risk, and that enable their businesses to effectively outsmart the competitive challenges by attaining the advantages in terms of innovation, cost efficiency and market responsiveness. While large firms struggle to sustain the innovativeness and market responsiveness as they experience inertia due to size, Whereas the small firms on the growth trajectory search for strategic means to overcome the competitive challenges and explore ways to break the industry barriers. Managers and organizational design experts have been proposing a variety of strategic and organizational solutions to sustain the dynamism and enable the firms to match the competition in terms of new products, lower cost, quality, and customer service. We propose in this paper, how a shoaling (school of fish design) approach will serve as distinctive corporate and business strategy and will benefit the firms to operate in a most nimble and effective way. This unique strategy will enable a large firm operate like a smaller firm as well as offer the small firm(s) many ways to cope with rivalry from larger players. On the one hand, this strategy reduces the opportunity cost of not exploiting the fleeting opportunities, and on the other hand reduces the sunk cost and investment risk by operating as dispersed but in a synchronized manner like the school of fish. We contemplate the economic and managerial rationale of the ‘shoaling strategy or disaggregated and dispersed organization', and its significance in the context of knowledge economy and turbulence experienced in several markets and industries