Bibliography
The research that created this Bibliography was instrumental in creating regenerative managing. Follow the link here to find out more about it:
An Introduction to Regenerative Managing
The comments provided with the references highlight particular points relevant to strategic management. They are not meant to be full reviews of these works.
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Identity is a powerful source of energy for innovation and producing value in pursuit of a mission. The organizational identity is reinforced by the wealth that feeds back into the business. Strategic and operational philosophies should be based on the organizational identity. Identity is a "governing force" that completely shapes an organization and determines the relationship it enjoys with stakeholders. It can be managed to become a positive governing force. Ackerman identifies eight laws of identity and their applications -- |
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A holistic approach to strategy formation, planning, and deployment in the context of the firm as a social system. Ackoff addresses business design with the idealized design concept. It is called idealized because it is unencumbered by the current culture, trajectory, and specific solutions to put the design in place, not because it is unrealistic. This design must be technologically feasible and operationally viable in the business's environment -- but it comes in two forms, bounded and unbounded. A bounded design assumes the environment of the business organization remains the same while the business organization design is unconstrained. An unbounded design permits the designers to change elements of the environment that can improve the performance of the business organization. This holds out the possibility of an enacted environment. Ackoff presents an integrated adaptive management system that incorporates this idealized design and regards the firm as a social system. |
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The general systems theory is extended into humans and human organizations. Individual and social behavior if viewed as a system of purposeful events. From this basis, they produce a detailed model of social systems and their classifications. This culminates in the view and definition of social groups as social systems and as ideal seeking systems. The authors develop operational definitions of terms such as knowledge, understanding, and wisdom -- being thorough in providing definitions and operational application of their concepts. |
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A holistic approach to strategy formation, planning, and deployment in the context of the firm as a social system. Ackoff addresses business design with the idealized design concept. It is called idealized because it is unencumbered by the current culture, trajectory, and specific solutions to put the design in place, not because it is unrealistic. This design must be technologically feasible and operationally viable in the business's environment -- but it comes in two forms, bounded and unbounded. A bounded design assumes the environment of the business organization remains the same while the business organization design is unconstrained. An unbounded design permits the designers to change elements of the environment that can improve the performance of the business organization. This holds out the possibility of an enacted environment. Ackoff presents an integrated adaptive management system that incorporates this idealized design and regards the firm as a social system. |
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Adner and Zemsky present an analysis of sustainable competitive advantage emphasizing the demand-side factors. In particular, the effects of decreasing marginal utility and consumer heterogeneity across market segments is shown to affect the sustainability of competitive advantage through shifts in consumer willingness to pay. Competitive advantage definition -- The authors define competitive advantage as superior value creation -- with the firm's ability to sustain competitive advantage equivalent to its ability to sustain added value. The demand-side drivers are 1) marginal utility from performance improvements, 2) consumer taste for quality, and 3) the extent of consumer heterogeneity. At the level of firm resources, competitive advantage erodes not only because imitation undermines the uniqueness of resources, but also because consumer valuation of firm differences declines due to effects of decreasing marginal utility. At the level of firm positions, strategic heterogeneity is shown to be rooted not only in differences between firms' internal resources but also in the extent of consumer heterogeneity in the firms' demand environment. |
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See the 1987 edition. |
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Corporate strategy is the pattern of decisions in a company that determines and reveals its objectives, purposes, or goals, produces the principal policies and plans for achieving those goals, and defines the range of business the company is to pursue, the kind of economic and human organization it is or intends to be, and the nature of the economic and noneconomic contribution it intends to make to its shareholders, employees, customer, and communities. In an organization of any size or diversity, "corporate strategy" usually applies to the whole enterprise, while "business strategy", less comprehensive, defines the choice of product or service and market of individual businesses within the firm. Business strategy is the determination of how a company will compete in a given business and position itself among its competitors. Corporate strategy defines the businesses in which a company will compete, preferably in a way that focuses resources to convert distinctive competence into competitive advantage. Both are outcomes of a continuous process of strategic management. The essence of strategy is pattern. The interdependence of purposes, policies, and organized action is crucial to the particularity of an individual strategy and its opportunity to identify competitive advantage. It is the unity, coherence, and internal consistency of a company's strategic decisions that position the company in its environment and give the firm its identity, its power to mobilize its strengths, and its likelihood of success in the marketplace. It is the interrelationship of a set of goals and policies that crystallizes, from the formless reality of a company's environment, a set of problems an organization can seize upon and solve. The pattern of goals and policies, rather than their separate substance, is the source of uniqueness that ideally should distinguish every company from its competitors. Especially when values visibly affect economic choices, the special character of a company becomes apparent to its employees and customers. "Andrews characterized the role of a strategist as one of finding the match between what a firm can do (organizational strengths and weaknesses) within the universe of what it might do (environmental opportunities and threats)." Foss, 1995. |
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Ansoff presents strategy as executive decision making. The need for strategy come out of the realization that a firm needs a well-defined scope and growth direction, that objectives alone do not meet this need, and that additional decision rules are required if the firm is going to have orderly and profitable growth. Such decision rules and guidelines have been broadly defined as strategy or, sometimes, as the concept of the firm's businesss. (pp 103) Strategy and objectives together define the concept of the firm's business (pp 112) -- Ansoff presented the product -- mission matrix as a way for firms to define the common thread of their own strategy and has been used as a means of identifying avenues for growth. One side of the matrix is the present and new mission as compared to the other side of present and new product. The matrix cells are thus -- |
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These authors are Clayton Christensen's colleagues, the disruptive innovation guru and author of The Innovator's Dilema. The first three author's are members of Innosight, an innovation and investment company founded on disruptive innovation principles. This book serves as a guide to the management and mastery of innovation. See Innovator's Guide to Growth for an introduction to the book. |
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This paper addresses the potential role of learning and feedback in the decision-making process which had, up to the time of its publication, largely been ignored. The single-loop model of decision making is presented as the most general model of action. A double-loop model is proposed as resulting in more effective decision making when the general model fails. `Argyris (1982) labels adaptive behaviors that result not simply in different activities but in different rules for choosing activities `double-loop learning.` Monitoring environmental feedback on the system’s past performance... is an important mechanism of adaptation for any open system.` (Scott & Davis, 2007, 92). In Argyris' terms: `Learning to become aware of one's present theory-in-use and then altering it is a very difficult process, because it requires that individuals question the theories of action that have formed the framework for their actions.` (p 370) emphasis added. `...theories-in-use are the basis of behavior, then they represent a source of confidence that one has in functioning effectively in one's world. To change one's theory-in-use would be risky. There are few group, organizational, or societal supports for significantly different behaviors.` (p 370) |
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This book is one of the building blocks of cognitive psychology, with its mechanistic/cybernetic view of the human brain. It specifically addresses the human ability of adaptive behavior. The hypothesis is that adaptive behavior is essentially mechanistic. Without a "critical state," variables of behavior are constant. When a critical state is reached, a "step-function" changes the field of variables (pp 90-91). This appears to be an early model of double-loop learning as described by Argyris (1976). |
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A framework is presented for harnessing complexity -- "deliberately changing the structure of the system in order to increase some measure of performance, and to do so by exploiting an understanding that the system itself is complex." The three stages of the framework are variation, interaction, and selection. Strategy is trivialized as "a conditional action pattern that indicates what to do in which circumstances" or "the way an agent responds to its surroundings and pursues its goals." Biological evolution is touched on as point of reference to teach about business organizations dealing with complexity. This is not done effectively. "Exploitation" is misinterpreted as copying, or replication, as opposed to the refinement and extension of existing competencies, technologies, and paradigms. The framework seems to be more problem focused than opportunity discovery focused. |
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Chester Barnard was the chief executive of AT&T. Along with Alfred Sloan of General Motors in 1963, he was one of the first executives to draw attention to the need for strategy in the context of business. This book is the first, or one of the first, to bring explicit definition to the functions of the executive, "executive processes, which are specialized functions in what we know as "organizations."" (1938, xxvii). Barnard notes the lack of understanding of psychologists, sociologists, and economists in explaining the phenomenon of organization while he also found that leaders of organizations of all types recognized "universal characteristics of organization that are active understandings, evaluations, concepts, of men skilled in organizing not only in the present but in past generations..." (xxviii). The uniqueness, at the time it was written, of Barnard's contribution is reflected in his comment about separating himself from economics and those who regarded man as "economic man" -- "though I early found out how to behave effectively in organizations, not until I had much later relegated economic theory and economic interests to a secondary -- though indispensable -- place did I begin to understand organizations or human behavior." (xxxi). |
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Barney defines culture and the criteria it meets in order to enable a sustained competitive advantage. |
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Barney introduces the concept of a strategic factor market, i.e. a market where the resources necessary to implement a strategy are acquired. Based on this construct, he concludes that a firm seeking greater than normal economic performance should seek it in its unique skills and capabilities, rather than from the analysis of its competitive environment. |
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Barney provides fundamental definitions and criteria for sustained competitive advantage and the resource-view of strategy. |
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An interesting discussion of positioning the resource-based view relative to the Structure-Conduct-Performance theories of advantage (Porter, 1980), neo-classical economics (Ricardo, 1817), and evolutionary economics (Nelson & Winter, 1982). |
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A textbook covering the basics of strategy, strategic analysis, business strategies, and corporate strategies. |
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Effective formal strategic planning - Formal planning has two productive uses -- Second, is to drive strategic creativity, increasing the innovativeness of a company's strategies through engaging conversations that challenge the status quo, produce experiments, and address themes that cut across the business units. Creative thinking cannot be forced. Nevertheless, companies can create conditions where it is much more likely that creative accidents will happen. The mechanisms to increase the odds of promoting creative accidents in strategy : |
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The method for approaching strategy accounts for the real world phenomena such as evolving complexity, punctuated equilibrium, and path dependence. In this type of world, the ability to make accurate predictions is suspect. The basis for strategy therefore needs to by based more on a portfolio of strategic initiatives that cover the competitive landscape, allowing for progressive evolution of the business in an unpredictable world. Six major actions for creating robust adaptive strategies are given: |
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Insightful, Intriguing, significant weaknesses Beinhocker presents an economic paradigm he calls complexity economics. It serves to explain the true nature of the economy and patterns of business performance. He presents an evolutionary algorithm to explain the evolutionary nature of economics, markets, and businesses. Businesses which fail to evolve, which is most of them, certainly fail to thrive and often go out of existence. Because economic evolution is unpredictable, there is no such thing as a static sustainable competitive advantage. Designing organizations to be better evolvers is what increases the odds of longevity and greater value creation. Complex and dynamic problems cannot be solved by rigid structures and bureaucratic decision making. Culture that enables dynamic decision makes for a more responsive organization. In the first section of the book, Beinhocker does a great job of presenting classical and neoclassical economics, along with their associated problems. This insightful compendium of economics history is worthy of a five star rating. The later sections of the book are also engaging for the implications of dynamics for management and leadership in strategically guiding their organizations. Call it the practical application of complexity economics. The explanatory framework of wealth created out of the increasing order produced by the co-evolution of physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs is useful. Business designs are reflected in Business Plans that meld the physical and social technologies under a strategy. In an evolutionary world, there is no optimal strategy, the shelf-life of a strategy is limited, and that shelf-life is unpredictable. At best, strategies can only be better than others for a limited time. Unfortunately, as intriguing as the later sections are, the build up is weak. The core of the book explains complexity economics Beinhocker's integrity is negatively impacted by his erroneous conclusions from his many cited resources and lack of sufficient citing. For example, in describing the source of economic progress, Beinhocker throws out Schumpeter's entrepreneur as the driving force of creative destruction, replacing him with impersonal technology evolution. He uses a 1990 study by Romer as his justification, saying Romer's study replaced the entrepreneur with technology as the driving force. Here is a quote from Romer (1990), "The source of energy for growth is technological change, knowledge built upon knowledge, arising from intentional actions taken by people who respond to market incentives." There is an intelligent agent in Romer's process that Beinhocker does not acknowledge. His message is also much more trivial than he makes out. If the origin of wealth creation is knowledge, so what? Drucker told us that decades ago: "Business can be defined as a process that converts an outside resource, namely knowledge, into outside results, namely economic values." (Peter F. Drucker, Managing for Results, Harper, 1964, page 5). Though the book has great information and ideas, it is less than it purports to be. See the reviews on Amazon.com for further criticisms. |
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This is a collection of four of Bennis's short writings. The one entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Change is a treasure of insights into innovation and organizational change. In reference to change, Bennis speaks of "Role innovators shift the whole paradigm in a practice sense." The impetus for the organization to change comes from the power of the new paradigm communicated as a metaphor. "It is not so much the articulation of goals of what... should be... that creates a new practice. It's the imagery that creates the understanding, the compelling moral necessity that the new way is right." (p 30), |
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The authors identify four leadership strategies, each with their own themes, areas of competency, and human handling skills (p 25-72): Bennis and Nanus emphasize key points that they feel get at the essence of leadership in their introduction to the second edition. Contrast the leadership criteria above with the oft used criteria organizations use to evaluate their executives: What is most important to leadership cannot be quantified. Pettigrew (1987, p 655) leveled charges at Bennis and Nanus's work which is worthy of consideration by the student of management. "As yet the absence of sustained empirical inquiry into the activities of corporate leaders suggests an over confident and over simple view of their role in organizational transformation. Part of the difficulty here is a rush into prescriptive writing before description and analysis (Bennis and Nanus, 1985), but more important are the analytical deficiencies underlying much of the research on leadership behaviour in the firm. These analytical difficulties include a concentration on leadership episodes rather than long-term leadership processes, a tendency to explore leader—follower relations without reference to the antecedent conditions which may influence their expression, and more significantly, the limited attempts to place leader behaviour in the context of political and cultural forces within the organization, and the wider economic and competitive forces with which the firm must operate." |
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"...there exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relations or "forces" between them. It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but of universal principles applying to systems in general." (Bertalanffy, 1968, pp 32) |
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Strategy as structured chaos addresses the dilemma of how to exploit the and explore the new without falling into either what the authors call the "overconnect trap" associated with efficient exploitation or the "disconnect trap" of creating such a big chasm between the old and the new that it cannot be overcome. The edge of chaos is the 'happy medium' between these two extremes. The book includes other illuminating frameworks about strategy as well. Brown and Eisenhardt present the concept of patching, a concept underpinned by the idea of modularity. "Patching refers to the dynamic mapping of modular business (or products and services) onto marketplace opportunities. It is about continuously realigning businesses with markets." (228) |
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Burgelman presents a framework for strategy creation in large, complex firms. This model is consistent with the variation-selection-retention, i.e. evolutionary, model explaining organizational survival, growth, and development. These firms are relatively independent of the tight control of external environment selection, such as large enough firms or sufficiently resource-rich, can engage in "strategic choice" (Child, 1972). Their strategic choice process involves substantive inputs from managers from different levels of the organization. Internally generated variation, resulting from the "enactment" (Weick, 1979) fo the environment, is at the minimum, a very important source of variation in such firms (Penrose, 1968). Strategic behavior, in Burgelman's model, refers to such enactments. This model integrates the business and corporate levels of analysis. The strategic behaviors in this model include the generic categories of induced and autonomous. Induced strategic behavior uses the categories provide by the current concepts of strategy to identify opportunities in the "enactable environment" (Weick, 1979). This behavior is shaped by the current structural context of the firm. The autonomous behavior comes from the reservoir of entrepreneurial potential that exists at the operational levels of these firms. Autonomous strategic behavior introduces new categories for the definition of opportunities -- concepts of new business opportunities. Unlike induced strategic behavior, which follows corporate strategy, autonomous behavior precedes corporate strategy. |
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This is largely a case study of the history of the evolution of Intel. The framework used to lend perspective and understanding to Intel's strategies is an evolutionary framework of the strategy making process. This process consists of balance of an induced strategy process and an autonomous strategy process. The induced process creates alignment amongst the strategic actions of the firm, reduces variation, and carries out a defined strategic intent. The autonomous process creates linkage of new business opportunities to the corporate strategy, thereby amending it. It increases variation and fosters internal entrepreneurship. |
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A masterful synthesis of the essential elements of the strategy process. More importantly, the authors go beyond the concept of balancing the induced (which seeks to reduce variation) vs. autonomous (which seeks to increase variation) strategy making process to providing pragmatic insights to managing this paradox. The relationship between strategic leadership and strategy making is a key highlight. |
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Burns presents a taxonomy of leadership, distinguishing, for example, intellectual leadership from executive leadership. He developed the concept of transformational leadership which stands in contrast to transactional leadership -- the two basic styles of leadership. |
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Social theory is explained in terms of four distinctively different perspectives, paradigms, of the phenomena of society and organizations. Burell and Morgan's framework juxtaposes the subjective and objective views of social reality against two alternative models for the analysis of social processes -- conflict, which they call radical change, and order, which they call regulation. This framework, and the four paradigms it defines, brings a depth of understanding to the theories and practices related to organizations. In the process of explaining their sociology framework, they provide a framework primer, explaining in depth what a frameworks are, how to use them, and their benefits. |
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In setting the stage for presenting their research on corporate demographics, Carroll & Hannan present solid definitions of organizational form, identity, and populations. |
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This book is a short-course in philosophy using jokes to make the philosophical points. See the author's website. |
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A series of case studies on the effective administration and growth of major American companies. Chandler explored how large businesses adapted their administrative structures to accommodate strategies of growth. In this work he gave a basic definition of strategy and structure which would have long-lasting resonance in the field: "strategy can be defined as the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals...Structure can be defined as the design of organization through which the enterprise is administered" (1962: 15-16). Chandler also suggested, based on his data, that "structure follows strategy and that the most complex type of structure is the result of the concatenation of several basic strategies" (1962: 16). (From: Heracleous, 2003, pp 4) |
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An excellent discussion of the role of theory in business. Theory definition, development, and application is covered. Causation vs. correlation is examined to reveal the common problems resulting from a lack of rigor in distinguishing between the two. |
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Noting that invention and innovation typically evolve from experimentation to pattern recognition, Christensen analogously identifies the initial set of patterns for companies to understand in forming a competitive advantage, from how to disrupt competitors to how to purse strategy. |
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Churchman (1971, p.18) recast the theories of knowledge of philosophers Leibnitz, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Singer "in the language and design of inquiring systems," providing "a description of how learning can be designed, and how the design can be justified." Each of the philosopher's approaches provides for a different way of gathering evidence and building models to represent a view of the world. |
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Coase examined the question of why business organizations exist in a specialized exchange economy in which the distribution of resources is "organized" by the price mechanism. Key points: |
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Synopsis from Weick (Weick, 1979, 21-22) -- Two major decision strategies in a garbage can organization are the strategies of oversight and flight. The strategy of oversight involves making quick choices. You make a choice whenever important problems are attached to some other choice and before they can drift to the choice you're making. Having made the choice you solve nothing, since the problems are still attached to other choices. Likewise, the decision style of flight involves delaying a choice until the problems wander away and attach themselves to other choices. Once the problems have left, then you make the choice. Again the choice solves no problems, since none are attached to it. In the computer simulation of this process, most decisions involve flight and oversight. This suggests why organizations can keep making decisions yet never solve any of their problems. Decision styles (From Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1972, pp 8) -- By resolution. Some choices resolve problems after some period of working on them. The length of time may vary, depending on the number of problems. This is the familiar case that is implicit in most discussions of choice within organizations. By oversight. If a choice is activated when problems are attached to other choices and if there is energy available to make the new choice quickly, it will be made without any attention to existing problems and with a minimum of time and energy. By flight. In some cases choices are associated with problems (unsuccessfully) for some time until a choice more attractive to the problems comes along. The problems leave the choice, and thus it is now possible to make the decision. The decision resolves no problems; they having now attached themselves to a new choice. Some choices involve both flight and resolution—some problems leave, the remainder are solved. These have been defined as resolution, thus slightly exaggerating the importance of that style. As a result of that convention, the three styles are mutually exclusive and exhaustive with respect to any one choice. The same organization, however, may use any one of them in different choices. Thus, the decision style of any particular variation of the model can be described by specifying the proportion of completed choices which are made in each of these three ways. |
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Collins and Porras (1994) identified visionary companies, those with "underlying timeless, fundamental principles and patterns that might apply across eras." These companies had superior market performance over the long term (as long as 1926 - 1990 for many of the companies). They identified 18 companies that met their visionary criteria. Eighteen comparison companies were selected. These companies that started at similar times, were in the same industry, and had performed well. In many cases, they performed better than the visionary companies early in their life. The study sought to identify what was different about the visionary companies that gave them the performance edge over the merely good companies. The visionary companies' success was attributed to the following characteristics: Like other writers of blockbuster business books, the authors are astute observers of the business world. What they dispense is knowledge worthy of strong consideration. Unfortunately, Collins and Porras cannot rightfully claim that their 1994 Built To Last work is scientific. It is all post hoc and lacks predictive value. The timeframe of Collins and Porras' study ends in 1990. In the next five and ten year periods, one-half of the visionary companies failed to match the performance of the S&P 500. In the five years following the study, 11 of these companies had profits decrease while 5 increased. The comparison companies, those that were merely good, had a majority perform above the S&P 500, 8 with increased profits and 4 with decreased profits. |
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Collins (2001) identified companies that had been good for at least 15 years that subsequently became great. These companies had the following pattern: "fifteen-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years." Directly comparable companies were found that did not make the same transition and some companies that made a short-term shift from good-to-great but failed to sustain it. These candidate companies were studied in depth to determine what was different about the good-to-great companies vs. the others. The distinctive characteristics of good-to-great companies are complementary and are part of an integrated set of behaviors that includes a continual disciplined management process, analogous to building momentum in a flywheel, which results in a breakthrough to greatness. The distinctive characteristics of the good-to-great companies are as follows: The good-to-great companies are Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bose, Walgreens, Wells Fargo. Like other writers of blockbuster business books, the authors are astute observers of the business world. What they dispense is knowledge worthy of strong consideration. Unfortunately, Collins cannot rightfully claim that this work is scientific. It is all post hoc and lacks predictive value. |
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A description of the resource-based view of strategy with five tests of what constitutes a valuable resource-capability combination. |
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Contains the definition of a Statement of Strategy, identifying the three critical components of objective, scope, and advantage. This statement definition is a brief statement, typically one concise sentence for each critical components accompanied by detailed annotations that "elucidate the strategy's nuances...and spell out its implications." The Strategy Statement's most critical element is the statement of advantage with its two components -- a statement of customer value proposition and the unique activities allowing that firm alone to deliver the customer value proposition.
The process to prepare the statement, of course following the development of a great strategy, is rigorous and challenging. A concise, well thought out statement, provides guidance critical to the effective organizational pursuit of the strategy. In the "Hierarchy of Company Statements, Strategy follows the Mission - Why we exist; Values - What we believe in and how we behave; and Vision - What we want to be -- with "What our competitive game plan will be; its ends, domain, and means. |
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A methodological approach to defining corporate strategy. |
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The fundamental differences between financial and real options is clearly explained. The case is made as to why the Black-Scholes-Merton model used for financial option valuation does not apply to real options. An alternative binomial algebraic model is not only suitable for spreadsheet use but is well suited to real options and their nested nature -- where the exercising of the first option uncovers not an underlying asset but another option. A decision tree is incorporated into the investment characterization process to reflect the dependent decisions and outcomes. Particular emphasis is placed on the need to manage real options like financial options from a timing perspective. Failure to decide late or early on the option execution destroys significant value in both cases. |
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Identifies the philisophical bases for variouis systematic methods of inquiry. |
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"Companies die because their managers focus on the economic activity of producing goods and services, and they forget that their organizations' true nature is that of a community of humans." Business organization success and longevity are interwoven. The business world has shifted from one dominated by capital to one dominated by knowledge. Unless their companies can accelerate the rate at which they learn, their primary asset will stagnate, and their competitors will pass them by. |
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This is a meta-analysis of the studies since 1990 that have identified the characteristics of high performance organizations (HPOs). From this analysis, several characteristics that seem to be decisive factors for achieving lasting good performance are identified. A framework with eight factors organizes the HPO characteristics -- There is a white paper associated with this article that includes the details of the study. |
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Jerker demonstrates that in a population of organizations that the outstanding performance of a few companies can be explained by purely random events. This finding strikes at the foundation of research that selects winners, post hoc, then draws conclusions about the behavior that leads to that success. This dramatic finding is important for strategists to understand in where they look for guidance in achieving and sustaining their own organization's competitive advantage. Related works -- This article is a great complement to Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect and Wiggins & Ruefli's, Sustained Competitive Advantage... and Schumpeter's Ghost.... It also ties in with understanding how humans tend to think, and their difficulty with probabilistic events, as revealed in Talib's The Black Swan and Douglas's Trading in the Zone. |
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Why would a strategist care about the ideas of a trader? Mark Douglas defines a particular way of thinking that enables one to thrive in an environment fraught with uncertainty. It is a sort of intuition combined with disciplined anti-intuitive thinking where pattern recognition meets rigorous rules in order to make consistent gains in the face of continuous uncertainty. This type of thinking holds some clues to how managers might train their minds to be highly capable probabilistic thinkers. Knowing anything can happen, you find you don't need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. When facing an environment with Gaussian events (normal distribution), an edge with a lot of bets will serve you well. Modes of thinking -- The "trader mindset - probabilistic thinker" is in contrast to the "uncertainty realist", who recognizes that the "big" events in this world are not only unpredictable but cannot even be assigned probabilities (see Taleb, The Black Swan) and the "modeler's" mind where analysis is king and the objective is to eliminate uncertainty. |
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The first book to look upon a "business" as an "organization" that is, as a social structure that brings together human beings in order to satisfy economic needs an wants of a community. This is the first book to identify the management discipline. The ideas in it launched the field of management and essentially created the field of management consulting. |
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The first comprehensive definition of the discipline of management. Coined the term knowledge worker. Drucker argued for an active approach to management which entailed planning and actions intended to shape a firm's environment as opposed to reacting passively to it. This is in essence strategic management. This is consistent with Drucker's later famous quote that the purpose of a business is to 'create a customer.' |
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The three different dimensions of the economic task of a business, thus the entrepreneurial tasks, are: (1) Make the present business effective, (2) the business potential must be identified and realized, and (3) make the business into a different business in the future. Drucker identifies eight business principles that must be pulled together into a coherent whole for effective management. A couple of key points: (1) management needs to focus on allocating resources to finding opportunities, not solving problems (innovating, not optimizing), and (2) businesses have a tendency to drift towards a diffusion of energy while concentration is the key to economic results. One of management's biggest challenges is developing and maintaining the discipline of sticking to what they clearly know are sound principles of business. Note Collin's keys to becoming a great company -- disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action. |
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Gave us the notion that strategic planning is action oriented - at at time when it was elitist thinking, centralized, and bureaucratic. It has not been until the early 2000s that strategy based on the evolutionary algorithm is being promoted as a learning by experimentation process as opposed to comprehensive analysis. |
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Drucker essentially explained that the world is flat, over 20 years before Friedman. |
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The overall economy is as described by Joseph Schumpeter, one of dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur. Innovation is the tool of entrepreneurs used to exploit change. Entrepreneurship is necessary for competitive advantage to be produced or sustained. Not being entrepreneurial is higher risk than being entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship is a management discipline which practices systematic innovation. |
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Managers need to focus on wealth creation, not the fiction of financial profits. |
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A comparative study of ADHD in a population of nomadic people, some of whom are nomadic and some now settled. Those with ADHD and nomadic were found to have higher BMI, due primarily to differences in fat free body mass, than those who were settled. This seems to indicate that certain behavioral characteristics, such as that behavior in people with ADHD genetics, favor an exploratory existence as a nomad vs. a more exploitative existence of a settled person. |
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Fahey lays out the principles and process of scenario planning. |
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See Stacey, 2000, for information on the series this book is part of. |
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This reveals the complementary nature of the resource-based and evolutionary theories of the firm and in strategy process development. These schools of thought have continued on in the theories of dynamic capability. |
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Conceptualization of social systems (pp 23-26) - Structure, as recursively organized sets of rules and resources, is out of time and space, save in its instantiations and co-ordination as memory traces, and is marked by an `absence of the subject.’ The social systems in which structure is recursively implicated, on the contrary, comprise the situated activities of human agents, reproduced across space and time. Analyzing the structuration of social systems means studying the modes in which such [social] systems, grounded in the knowledgeable activities of situated actors who draw upon rules and resources in the diversity of action contexts, are produced and reproduced in interactions (bold italic emphasis added). All competent members of society are vastly skilled in the practical accomplishments of social activities and are expert 'sociologists'. The knowledge they possess is not incidental to the persistent patterning of social life but is integral to it. This stress is absolutely essential if the mistakes of functionalism and structuralism are to be avoided, mistakes which, suppressing or discounting agents' reasons — the rationalization of action as chronically involved in the structuration of social practices — look for the origins of their activities in phenomena of which these agents are ignorant. But it is equally important to avoid tumbling into the opposing error of hermeneutic approaches and of various versions of phenomenology, which tend to regard society as the plastic creation of human subjects. Each of these is an illegitimate form of reduction, deriving from a failure adequately to conceptualize the duality of structure. According to structuration theory, the moment of the production of action is also one of reproduction in the contexts of the day-to-day enactment of social life. This is so even during the most violent upheavals or most radical forms of social change. It is not accurate to see the structural properties of social systems as 'social products' because this tends to imply that pre-constituted actors somehow come together to create them. In reproducing structural properties to repeat a phrase used earlier, agents also reproduce the conditions that make such action possible. Structure has no existence independent of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in their day-to-day activity. Human agents always know what they are doing on the level of discursive consciousness under some description. |
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A study identifying two key variables involved in building and sustaining organizational inertia, resource and routine rigidity. These variables do not tend to change in the same way when the organization is threatened in a way that requires that it change, that the organizational inertia be decreased. This calls for managements' attention to managing both factors in different manners. |
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The four approaches to mass customization --
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A compilation of techniques for building strategic thinking competency.
"Strategic thinking is defined as coming up with alternative viable strategies or business models that deliver customer value." Strategic thinking has to do with finding alternative ways of competing and providing customer value. A company needs to compete, it needs a strategy to compete. A strategy is more than a plan, as strategy implies competing -- outwitting competitors and providing unique value.