Developing future strategies for a company is an important and complex task, and forms the core issue in this book. A company’s strategy defines its future direction, specifying its desired market position and key competitive advantages both at the level of market offers and of resources. This book provides clear, straightforward advice for professionals: after a brief introduction to strategic planning, a heuristic process for determining future strategies is presented. It shows how to analyze a company’s current situation, develop and assess options for the future, and define implementation projects. Throughout the book, detailed recommendations are illustrated with the help of numerous concrete examples. As a result of studying applications of the book in practice, the second edition benefits from a simplified, hands-on analysis and planning process at the business level.
"Books and articles come and go, endlessly. But a few do stick, and this book is such a one. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process broke fresh ground in the understanding of strategy at a time when thinking about strategy was still in its early days, and it has not been displaced since." —David J. Hickson, Emeritus Professor of International Management & Organization, University of Bradford School of Management Originally published in 1978, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process became an instant classic, as it bridged the formerly separate fields of strategic management and organizational behavior. In this Stanford Business Classics reissue, noted strategy scholar Donald Hambrick provides a new introduction that describes the book's contribution to the field of organization studies. Miles and Snow also contribute new introductory material to update the book's central concepts and themes. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process focuses on how organizations adapt to their environments. The book introduced a theoretical framework composed of a dynamic adaptive cycle and an empirically based strategy typology showing four different types of adaptation. This framework helped to define subsequent research by other scholars on important topics such as configurational analysis, organizational fit, strategic human resource management, and multi-firm network organizations.
Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.
You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.
This book investigates strategy formulation by comparing military & Business practices. It assesses whether the strategy process in the business field also prevails in the military context. Based on interviews and case studies, the author uses a framework of influences including organisation, leadership, risk, theory and context to consider the areas of similarity and difference. While significant parallels can be found, greater importance is placed on the formulation of aims and goals, and the identification and training of leaders in the military. This provides valuable lessons for business strategists.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.
The premise of this volume is that the complex social processes that animate strategic decisions involve not only top-level executives, but also middle managers distributed throughout the organization. Designed for doctoral students and others interested in middle managers and strategy process, the Handbook integrates the threads of scholarly work in this domain and charts a course for future research. Chapters are written both by scholars who have ‘paved the way’ for the middle management perspective and scholars who have done recent, cutting edge research from this point of view.
This book quantifies best practices for developing innovative products cost-effectively. Analyses of dozens of studies show how managing the work of people collaborating in parallel creates products faster, cheaper, and better in any organization. Concurrent systems deploy four kinds of practice simultaneously to synergistically achieve high performance: Strategy, Process, Organization, and Tools/Technologies (SPOT).Appendices in every chapter enable stakeholders to benchmark their practices against Best-in-Class standards and identify gaps. A 'Big Bang' index prioritizes best practices for improvement. A Composite Model™ algorithm enables designers of product development systems to further boost performance capabilities by combining complementary practices additively and synergistically. Managers and stakeholders collaborate in using these unique methods to build a 'should be' vision of value development by closing gaps in their 'as is' system to achieve diverse competitive advantages.Case studies highlight how dozens of enterprises have successfully implemented SPOT practices to improve their performance. A transformation assurance process (TAP) provides tactics for champions to co-lead a five-step change journey: (1) Envisioning, (2) Diagnosing, (3) Assessing, (4) Implementing, and (5) Improving.
Strategic management is a field that has diversity in approach and scope, but relative homogeneity in pedagogy. This book, a refreshed edition of its successful predecessor, brings something different to the field, by concisely introducing it with a focus on doing business in the Middle East and North Africa. Supplemented by online case studies and other resources, the reader is exposed to a plethora of concepts, theories, practical implications, and experiential exercises in the strategic management process. The updated text explores key regional issues, including the "Arab Spring", economic recession, corporate social responsibility, the role of women in business and the rise of emerging economies. The reader is encouraged to look at the world in light of the challenges many organizations are facing around the globe. Features like "Stop and Think Critically" and "Focus" points throughout each chapter encourage and inspire a thoughtful reading of the text. This is a book designed to aid undergraduate and graduate students, as well as managers in both for-profit and non-profit sectors. The authors guides the reader through both new and ongoing issues in the field of strategic management, and allow them to foster a greater understanding of this ever-developing field.
