The authors note that benchmarking is the systematic process of searching for best practices, innovative ideas, and highly effective operating procedures that lead to superior performance. Best practice benchmarking, considering the experience of others, is a fundamental approach to managing in today's work world. New and innovative methods are important because organizations must look outside to find the best practices in order to motivate their organization to meet the highest standards possible. Included in the appendix are worksheets that can be copied in order to integrate benchmarking into the organization.

Strategic Executive Development--written by three leaders in the field of executive development, James F. Bolt, Michael McGrath and Michael Dulworth--shows how world-class companies use executive development to drive business strategy and affect growth. This important resource presents five strategic uses of executive development that produce demonstrable business impact. Based on empirical data gathered from their extensive research and consulting, and a comprehensive survey of executive development in leading organizations, this book answers the key question: What are the investments in executive development that have the biggest impact? Using illustrative case studies, the authors clearly demonstrate how executive development is being successfully implemented at some of the world's most recognizable and enduring companies, including Texas Instruments. These cases describe what is working and why, offer insights into the key process steps, and show how companies have measured and validated the effects of executive development. Strategic Executive Development offers the framework needed to create an executive development strategy and program that will help your organization achieve measurable business results and develop the executive capabilities needed to win in the marketplace

The paper studies the relations between technological strategies and market success of firms, through an empirical analysis of the commercial aero-engine industry since 1948 to 1997 detailed at the level of competition among single firms products. It uses a multidimensional measure of technical progress through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for measuring technological performances of single products and firms and data on sales of each product over time for representing market success. The paper confirms the existence of heterogeneity of firms technological strategies and draws some main conclusions with respect to strategies of convergence and divergence from the technological frontier, first mover advantage and survival of inefficient products.

This paper is about the role of scenarios in strategic management. Generally, a scenario depicts some feasible future state of organizational's environment and mostly includes the dynamic sequence of interacting events, conditions and changes that is nessasary to reach that state. The scenario approach changed considerably during the last two deacades. This reflected in the different functions ascribed to scenarios. The more traditional functions (in first generation scenarios) are tool for evaluation and selection of ctrategies, integration of various kinds of data, and exploration and identification of future possibilities. The more recent ones (in second generation scenarios) are making managers aware of environmental uncertainties, stretching of managers' mental models, and triggering and accelerating processes of organizational learning. The paper discusses especially the later cluster of functions wich are closely linked to each other.
By linking the dynamic-development process to Kolb's learning cycle and strategic management, the strategic learning cycle can be enhanced. The strategic learning cycle elucidates a number of bottlenecks that may seriously hinder learning within strategic management. Scenarios seem to dissolve these bottelnecks and in doing so support strategic learning.

This paper looks at ways in which a framework for strategy evaluation can be constructed which is consistent with the adaptive and interpretive schools of strategic management. It suggests that some of the key instruments in the rational planning toolkit can be reinterpreted as methods for managing power and uncertainty in a multi-stakeholder environment.

Изменения, происходящие в экономике России, все больше требуют от руководителей умения видеть перспективы, принимать обоснованные стратегические решения. Предлагаемая читателю книга Клиффа Боумена поможет восполнить пробел в литературе по стратегическому управлению. Она содержит интересный теоретический материал, большое количество практических примеров и конкретную деловую ситуацию с заданиями. Книга будет полезна всем, кто заинтересован в успешной работе своей компании.

Agency theory embeds the influential relationship that exist between managers and shareholders of firms. This relationship has the potential to influence decision-making in the firm which in turn has potential impacts on firm characteristics such as firm value. Prior evidence has demonstrated an association between ownership structure and firm value. This paper extends the literature by proposing a further link between ownership structure and capital structure. Using an agency framework we argue that the distribution of equity ownership among corporate managers and external blockholders has a significant relationship with leverage. The paper tests four hypotheses that explore various aspects of this relationship. The empirical results provide support for a positive relationship between external blockholders and leverage, a curvilinear relationship between the level of managerial share ownership and leverage and finally, the results suggest that the relationship between external block ownership and leverage varies across the level of managerial share ownership. These results parallel and are consistent with the active monitoring hypothesis, convergence-of-interests and the entrenchment hypotheses which have been proposed in a different context.

The topic of entrepreneurship has been the subject of a considerable amount of academic interest over the last twenty years. Despite a vast amount of published work there have been very few attempts to study the entrepreneurial process. In other words, we know little of the what happens as an entrepreneur moves from idea to the objective reality of a fully functioning business. A more recent phenomenon has been the shift from a focus on entrepreneurial traits to the study of entrepreneurial networks. This is recognition that even the most individualistic of entrepreneurs rely heavily on their social relationships during the creation of a new business. These two factors, networks and the entrepreneurial process, are brought together in this paper which utilises a first-hand account of activities associated with business startups. The paper also examines the way in which MBA education provides useful skills to even the most experienced entrepreneur.

When European managers of differing cultural backgrounds meet, they often have considerable difficulties when it comes to understanding one another. These cultural dissimilarities have a decidedly negative influence on their ability to collaborate.. The factor Culture can be especially disturbing when the acting persons are not aware of their cultural dissimilarities. Since the differences between Europeans are not as obvious as between Japanese and German businessmen, for example, people tend to neglect the influence of Culture in business relations in Europe. One innovative way of researching cultural differences is the Cultural Standard Method. It is based on a qualitative research approach and provides a tool for identifying cultural differences on a more subtle level. The purpose of this paper is to describe the cultural standards method as a tool for the comparison of European business cultures and to give examples of recent research results.

This paper is an exploration of how sensemaking patterns amongst management groups influence the actual practices of strategising over extended periods of time. Using an eight-year longitudinal case study of a single strategic issue, (a strategic marketing innovation in a division of a global financial services company), the paper aims to advance the work of Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) by exploring the micro-processes of sensegiving and other sensemaking patterns amongst management groups. In the first order analysis, four different patterns of sensemaking are identified: sensegiving, fragmented sensemaking, polarised sensegiving and communal sensemaking. In the second order analysis the paper explores deeper explanations for each of the patterns of the sensemaking processes by examining contextual variables and triggers for each sensemaking pattern. Finally, a phased model is presented for discussion which links the four sensemaking patterns together over time and in so doing, identifies a number of theoretical issues in the strategising process such as the dynamic patterns of actions and interactions between senior and middle managers, the integration of micro-politics and sensegiving patterns, the study of social action in sensemaking beyond strategic conversations and communications, and the dynamic nature of consensus and diversity.

The overall picture of change effectiveness is rather gloomy. The change environment presented in terms of two general dimensions: power distance and uncertainty. The authors revealed and described the four generic change failures: leadership failure, negotiation failure, registration failure and action-planning failure. In conclusion the authors presents three major reasons for change failures: fail to see that their environment is changing; fail to apply the right strategies in view of the organizational environment so even the correct assessment of the environment and the selection of the correct strategy can lead to change failure.

The focus of this paper is on discussing the modularity concept through an in-depth and critical analysis of the wide literature on the subject. The identification of three main streams of research, which most of the literature can be inserted in, will be finally used to propose a conceptual reading of the process of modularisation in its main stages and dynamics.

During the last years a debate has raged within the field of Strategic Management between a rational view (IO, Positioning School, Strategic Planning, Cybernetics) and a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) view (Emergent strategies,complexity theory, chaos theory) of the field. This paper attempts to shed some light around an issue which must be clarified for the better development of such debate. Being the CAS view a response to the new realities of environmental turbulence, it was discussed which are the behavioral sources of such turbulence in order to clarify if such phenomena is a qualitatively new reality of business environments, or simply a contingent but circumstantial feature affecting many industries. For this purpose, the authors introduced and applied a theoretical model that conceives the strategy of the firm, as a dialectic process in a situation of conflict.

Единственная книга по корпоративной культуре, которая позволяет исследовать культуру с помощью цифр. При использовании представленной рамочной структуры конкурирующих ценностей в процессе преподавания и консультирования предприятий обычным отзывом является такое высказывание: "Ну, наконец-то, мы поняли, как с ней (культурой) управляться, а то все слова, да слова".

The paper discusses the relationship between globalization and, modularization and outsourcing in the auto industry. It maintains that modularity is a broad concept, applicable and applied to product design, manufacturing and organization and that modularization is a strategy aimed at reducing the complexity stemming from globalization of products, markets and production. However, modularity has only recently moved its first steps in auto design and manufacturing and is a vaguely defined and ambiguously used concept in the auto industry. The paper suggests that, in the auto industry, economic and institutional factors related to globalization represent key drivers of modularization as much as technology. Besides, as the auto industry globalize, modularization and outsourcing, though remaining conceptually distinct, tend to become, in practice, increasingly inseparable.