PERCEIVING OPPORTUNITY “THROUGH A FOG OF UNCERTAINTY” : HAWORTH, INC. (1948–1976)
William R.
Sandberg, University of South Carolina
Thomas J. Hench, University of
Wisconsin, LaCrosse
Principal Topic
A recent survey (Hills and Shrader, 1998) indicates that entrepreneurs see their own recognition of opportunities as a learning process whereby ideas arise through both creativity and the contributions of others and which continues adaptively even after the firm is established in a market. Formal planning and the content of plans appear to be related to performance, depending on the venture’s stage of development (Lumpkin, Shrader, and Hills, 1998).
We examine opportunity recognition and planning through the lens of emergent, self-organizing systems. The processes by which firms develop may be too murky to yield readily to surveys and other common methodologies of management research. Like Kirzner (1984, 1985), we emphasize “alertness” (“spontaneous discovery of . . . opportunities”) that embraces future as well as current conditions. Through “a continuous discovery process” the entrepreneur “attempts to grasp opportunities . . . as he peers through a fog of uncertainty.”
Method
We examine the continuous process of discovery and related influences on the birth and emergence of Haworth, Inc., today a leading competitor in the office systems furniture industry. From contemporary published accounts, company archives, and Hench’s interviews with industry observers and principal managers and employees of Haworth and its rivals, we use the methodologies of history and of case study research (Yin, 1984) to describe and interpret opportunity recognition, planning, and key decisions at Haworth over more than 25 years. Our study follows Haworth from its founding through its decisions in 1976 to exit the floor-to-ceiling panel market and to introduce the Era-1 panel line with its built-in electrical power distribution system.
Implications
Key decisions that transformed Haworth and substantially changed its industry illustrate the unplanned nature of opportunity recognition in the strategic management of an entrepreneurial company. Future research calls for longitudinal designs and qualitative methodologies to depict and understand opportunity recognition’s underlying processes of alertness, discovery, and learning in ways that surveys and cross-sectional designs probably cannot.
CONTACT: William R. Sandberg, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; (T) 803-777-5980; (Fax) 803-777-6876; sandberg@darla.badm.sc.edu.
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1999 by Babson College. All rights reserved. Last updated March 2000.