ABSTRACT
The last chapter recounted some of the key events leading up to the merger between SmithKline Beckman and Beecham to create the new company of SmithKline Beecham (SB). That chapter explored how one might make sense of these events. I argued that mainstream thinking about the strategic development of an organization, including new product development, is based on the assumption that managers are by and large “in control” of such developments. This thinking, however, does not resonate with my experience of these events because that experience was characterized as much by features of “not being in control” as it was by features to do with “being in control.” It is difficult to make sense of this fundamentally paradoxical experience in terms of a way of thinking that collapses the paradox to one of its poles, namely, that of “being in control.” This led me to suggest an alternative way of thinking, which employs analogies from the complexity sciences that may be more helpful in making sense of my experience because it is a way of thinking in which paradox is central. From this alternative perspective, the merger between the two companies emerged in the ongoing interactions between individual managers, and various groups of managers, over a number of years preceding the merger itself. The intentions and choices of powerful managers certainly played a part, and in that sense they were “in control.” But these intentions themselves emerged in previous interactions. They constituted gestures and the unpredictable responses that they evoked and provoked, and their reactions to these responses, also played a powerful role. In these senses they were “not in control.”
