The Impact of a Firm’s Financial Flexibility on its Strategic Renewal: Key Concepts with Evidential Support from Businesses Across Industries

To propose a research agenda towards making an assessment of a firm’s practices of financial flexibility and their impact on its strategic renewal. The paper takes the form of a theoretical discussion on few major practices of financial flexibility that a firm can choose to exercise in its attempts to bring about strategic self-renewal on a sustained basis. The paper triggers a discussion on few possible takeaways for organizations in their attempts to integrate existing financial practices, generate new practices of financial flexibility and successfully exploit this new knowledge towards strategic renewal initiatives of the organizations. This is a developmental paper and many of its suggestions require rigorous testing through studies in a wider array of settings. Firms can inculcate the spirit of financial flexibility judiciously towards enhancing their strategic flexibility in their attempts to augment their prospects of strategic renewal. Finance being the most fungible resource that a firm possesses, every attempt should be made to leverage such a resource towards optimally managing the diverse portfolio of projects that a firm undertakes in its endeavor to fructify its strategic renewal goal, on an ongoing basis, while generating additional wealth for its shareholders. The paper provides a snapshot of various corporate practices of financial flexibility adopted by firms across industries and the respective success/failure stories the lessons of which when learnt properly can go a long way in the strategic self-renewal of many an organization.