Extending the marketing myopia concept to promote strategic agility created by Kevin Johnston

This paper proposes that many firms suffer from ‘self-concept specificity’. This is an unconsciously self-imposed restriction on creative strategy formulation that is the result of a highly bounded concept of a firm held by its senior management. Recognising that this concept resonates with Levitt's seminal Marketing Myopia concept, the paper draws on Resource-based View and Network Organisations literature to add two further dimensions, Capability Myopia and Boundary Myopia respectively. The paper then explores insights that systems thinking and organisational learning literature may provide to help firms to escape the paradox of adaptation in which conflicting imperatives drive both specialisation and variety. Such insights may allow strategic managers to be made more aware of their current organisational self-concept and its constraints, to challenge its assumptions and to reframe it, so generating more innovative strategic options.