From Resource Allocation to Strategy

From Resource Allocation to Strategy

Author: Joseph L. Bower

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-10-27

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 019151540X

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Joseph L. Bower and Clark G. Gilbert have collected together some of the leading experts on strategy to examine how strategy is actually made by company managers across the several levels of an organization. Is strategy a coherent plan conceived at the top by a visionary leader, or is it formed by a series of smaller decisions, not always reflecting what top management has in mind? Often it is by examining how options for using resources are developed and selected, that we can see how a company's competitive position gets shaped. On the basis of this understanding, we can see better how these processes can be managed. The book's five sections examine how the resource allocation process works, how the way it works can lead a company into serious problems, how top management can intervene to fix these problem, and where the most recent thinking on these problems is headed. A fifth section contains assessments of this work by thought leaders in the fields of economics, competitive strategy, organizational behavior, and strategic management. The implications for those who study firms are considerable. Activity that is normally thought about in terms of substantive outcomes such as market share and revenue growth, or present value and internal rate of return, is seen to be inextricably related to organizational and administrative questions. The findings presented here should inform the research of economists, strategists, and behavioral scientists. Thoughtful executives and those who consult with them will also find the book provocative. The processes described are complex, but clear enough so that the way toward effective management is apparent. The models developed provide a basis for building the systems and organization necessary for today's competitive world.


Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Author: Richard Rumelt

Publisher: Currency

Published: 2011-07-19

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307886239

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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.


Deep Dive

Deep Dive

Author: Rich Horwath

Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group

Published: 2009-08

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1608320332

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Get competitive by learning to think strategically.The inability to set good strategy can sink a company¿and a leader¿s career. A recent Wall Street Journal study revealed that the most sought-after executive skill is strategic thinking, but only three out of ten managers have this skill set.Horwath explains the three keys to strategic thinking, breaks them down into simple, attainable skills, and gives you practical tools to apply them every day, providing managers with a clear path to mastery of the three disciplines: 1. Acumen¿generate critical insights through a step-by-step evaluation of your business and its environment2. Allocation¿focus your limited resources through strategic trade-offs 3. Action¿implement a system to guarantee effective execution of strategy at all levels of your organization Based on new research with senior executives from 150 companies and the author¿s experience as a thought-leading strategist, Deep Dive is the first book to focus on the most important level of strategy¿you. Armed with this knowledge and dozens of effective tools, you can become a truly strategic leader for your organization.--Rich Horwath is the president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former chief strategy officer, and professor of strategy at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. As a thought-leading strategist, he has worked with such giants as Adidas, Amgen, and Pfizer. He is the author of four books and more than fifty articles on strategic thinking and has been profiled in business publications around the world, including Investor¿s Business Daily.


Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Author: Martin Reeves

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1625275870

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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.


Human Resource Strategy

Human Resource Strategy

Author: Peter A. Bamberger

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2000-02-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1452221812

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Human Resource Strategy provides an overview of the academic and practitioner responses to these and other questions. Applying an integrative framework, the authors review twenty years' worth of empirical and theoretical research in an attempt to reconcile often-conflicting conceptual models and competing empirical results. The authors present much of the relevant research in the context of the critical strategic decisions that executives must actually make with regard to human resource investments and deployments. As a result, often complex theoretical models and scientific findings are presented such that they are not only understandable but also highly relevant to non-research-oriented practitioners.


Delivering Impact with Digital Resources

Delivering Impact with Digital Resources

Author: Simon Tanner

Publisher: Facet Publishing

Published: 2020-01-13

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1856049329

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This book provides practical guidance for delivering and sustaining value and impact from digital content. Our digital presence has the power to change lives and life opportunities. We must understand digital values to consider how organisational presence within digital cultures can create change. Impact assessment is the tool to foster understanding of how strategic decisions about digital resources may be fostering change within our communities. Delivering Impact with Digital Resources focuses on introducing both a mechanism and a way to thinking about strategies and evidence of benefits that extend to impact. Such that, the existence of a digital resource shows measurable outcomes that demonstrate a change in the life or life opportunities of the community. The book proposes an updated Balanced Value Impact Model (BVIM) to enable each memory organization to convincingly argue they are an efficient and effective operation, working in innovative modes with digital resources for the positive social and economic benefit of their communities. Coverage includes: · a guide to using the Balanced Value Impact Model and a wide range of data gathering and evidence based methods · exploration of strategy in the context of digital ecosystems, an attention economy and cultural economics · working with communities and stakeholders to deliver on promises implicit in digital resources/activities · major case studies about Europeana, the Wellcome Trust and the National Gallery of Denmark, amongst others · an exploration of the difference between the attitudes expressed by groups within digital cultures versus the actual behaviours they exhibit using impact exemplars from many sectors and geographies to show how they are explored and applied. Readership: This book will be especially useful for those managing digital presences in libraries, archives, galleries and museums including MA and PhD students studying subjects such as librarianship, information science, museums studies, archival studies, publishing, cultural studies and media studies. Companion website https://www.bvimodel.org/ featuring additional content, BVI model implementations, adaptions and templates and much more.


Corporate Strategy

Corporate Strategy

Author: David J. Collis

Publisher: Irwin Professional Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780071111072

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"Corporate Strategy" by Collis and Montgomery employs a single consistent framework for the analysis of corporate-level strategy. Based on the latest research in the resource-based view of the firm and organizational economics, it develops a rigorous approach to the many important issues surrounding the scope of the firm. Starting from the analysis of how valuable resources contribute to the competitive advantage of a single business, the book progresses through the analysis of scale, scope and vertical integration within an industry, to the treatment of diversification and the management of multi-business firms. As such, it perfectly complements those required strategy courses that develop the notions of strategy as the internal consistency and external positioning of single business firms. This new edition has been completely updated, including a new chapter on corporate transformation


Strategy Builder

Strategy Builder

Author: Stephen Cummings

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-04-27

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 1118707230

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A visual and interactive guide to building and communicating strategies that actually work YOUR STRATEGY HAS SEVEN SECONDS TO CAPTIVATE ITS AUDIENCE… So how are you going to present it? A big wordy document? A lengthy address? Slides full of bullet points? The best way to engage and involve people is through pictures. Strategy Builder shows you how to creatively combine the best strategy frameworks to orient and animate strategy discussion and development in your team. This visual, interactive guide, with illustrations by Visory, uses real world examples and practical tips to help you: Discover the five key foundations that every strategy should be built upon Draw compelling and unique pictures that capture your organization’s distinct strategies Develop your skills as a leader of strategy discussions Understand how to use interactive drawing to engage others and achieve ‘buy in’ Additional online resources available including Strategy Drawing Templates, plus Builder Slides and case studies materials for instructors. Locate the 'Companion Website' link towards the bottom of this page to access these materials. Test your strategic vision or develop a new strategic plan based on the best elements of key strategic frameworks by trying the FREE interactive Strategy Builder app, developed in association with StrategyBlocks, at www.strategicplan.com Praise for Strategy Builder: Cummings & Angwin are pioneers in introducing novel approaches in teaching and applying the principles of strategy --Robert M. Grant, Bocconi University, author of Contemporary Strategy Analysis In a complex, fast changing world, where we are bombarded by words, numbers and reports, the visual-first approach to strategy provided by Strategy Builder is immensely helpful for inspiring and communicating a clearer vision of how to move forward. -- Rachna Bhasin, VP Strategy, SiriusXM At last someone has grasped this idea and come up with a way to help us demonstrate strategic plans and ambitions in a creative new way. --Vikki Heywood CBE, Chair of The Royal Society for the Arts This wonderful book is the first to solve a near-universal problem: communicating strategic ideas is just as hard and just as important as coming up with them in the first place, and both are visual activities. The question is not “Do you understand?” but “Do you see?” --William Duggan, Professor, Columbia University, author Strategic Intuition This book shows how to draw an organization's strategy so you see what's been considered, what's not been considered, and how things are related,. Strategy building is presented as a fun and involving learning process.The approach is revolutionary in that it enables not only the development but also the easy sharing of strategic understanding. --Roger L.M. Dunbar, Emeritus Professor, Stern School of Business, New York University What a great idea! They layout is also really thoughtful; it makes you immediately want to get out a pencil and start doodling. --Adam Martin, Customer Solutions Director, The Brakes Group As a time pressed executive it was a delight to find a book that I can dip into to find the best strategic frameworks - those that have proved the test of time and academic scrutiny as being truly useful in the workplace. Even better for an inveterate scribbler: endorsement that a picture and ‘permission to play’ with ideas visually really does say a thousand words and more! --Sarah Mitson, Global Business Director, TNSGlobal This is an invaluable resource for any executive wanting to improve engagement in strategy development and communication. The accessible layout means that the book itself can play an active and inspiring role in strategy discussions. --Matt Thomas, Director, Braxton Associates, Strategy Consultants At last a book that grasps the implications of recent psychology: people think visually as well as verbally. The authors provide powerful visual devices that will both help managers conceive better strategies and enable their people to execute them more effectively. --Richard Whittington, Professor at Saïd Business School, Oxford University A powerful approach to make strategy more engaging again! Strategy Builder is landmark book is destined to make an important impact to the field of strategy, strategizing and strategic management. Executives across the board (and students of strategy) will find the core message of this book counterintuitive and compelling. The idea of "drawing" strategy may seem like child's play, yet all great strategists and philosophers know that it is through such "serious play" that allows us to see things differently so that we can see different things. --Robert Wright, Professor of Strategy, Hong Kong Polytechnic University