Книги

В докладе расматривается тема, достаточно актуальная в последние годы - реформирование предприятий реального сектора экономики различных регионов России и ближнего зарубежья.
Автор, сам принимавший участие в данных проектах, прежде всего, выделяет несколько основных причин, предопределивших кризисное или близкое к нему, состояние значительной части бывших государственных промышленных предприятий. Это причины:
1. неумение и нежелание руководителей предприятий производить и продавать то, чего ожидает платежеспособный потребитель, проще говоря, ориентироваться и выживать в конкурентной, рыночной среде
2. неспособность планировать, соизмерять свои доходы и расходы, в конечном итоге уметь финансово анализировать ситуацию на рынке
Автор убедительно показывает, что руководители предприятий еще очень далеки от понимания того, что грамотное управление стоит немалых денег, а безграмотное – еще больших.
Доказывает что – отсутствие управленческого инструментария и технологий для управления маркетингом, экономикой и финансами крайне отрицательно сказывается на всем, начиная от перспектив самого предприятия до откровенной дезориентации руководителей дилентантизмом многих, так называемых «консультантов по управлению».
Основной вывод доклада - нужны простые, рациональные и понятные большинству российских руководителей технологии управления.
Прежде всего управления маркетингом и продажами, экономикой и финансами.
Только после освоения этих необходимых технологий управления и наведения элементарного порядка можно задумываться над всевозможными реинжинирингами и другими модными теориями.

In todays competitive landscape organizational learning and knowledge management initiatives are emerging of powerful sources of competitive advantage. In this paper, the researches report on the design and expected result of a survey on knowledge management, which has been designed putting special emphasis on the interplay between the technical and non-technical aspects of learning and knowledge management initiatives. Questionnaires have been sent to 1100 firms from 11 industries in Spain, in order to be able to conduct both intra- and inter-industry analysis. In addition, in order to enrich the results, in-depth interviews was going to be held with selected companies. This allowed the authors to report on (1) what knowledge management initiatives was planned and carried out, (2) the role of technology in these initiatives, (3) the role of non-technical aspects like career planning and human resource policies, (4) the perceived effectiveness of the initiatives, and (5) the main underlying causal dynamics at work.

Empirical studies of strategising face contradictory pressures. Ethnographic approaches are attractive, and typically expected. We argue, however, that todays large, multinational, and highly diversified organisational settings require supplementary methods providing more breadth and flexibility. This paper discusses three particularly promising approaches (interactive discussion groups, self-reports, and practitioner-led research) that fit the increasingly disparate research paradigms now being used to understand strategising and other management issues. Each of these approaches is based on the idea that strategising research cannot advance significantly without reconceptualising frequently taken-for-granted assumptions. The paper focuses in particular on the importance of working with organisational members as research partners rather than passive informants.

The paper starts with a discussion on time, and on how different time reckoning systems have been introduced and used to coordinate activities. The discussion leads to the conclusion that time has become institutionalized and conceived of as a taken-for-granted commodity. At the same time, however, time is socially constructed. We argue that different constructions of time can be escribed using four dimensions (rate, duration, synchronization, and sequence), and that that the construction of time, as far as the four dimensions are concerned, is of importance for the organizing and coordination of activities. Four different coordinating principles (time schedules, levelers, checkpoints, and brackets) are derived from a discussion on the four dimensions. Thereafter five empirical examples on coordination of time are presented. The empirical examples are used to further analyze the coordinating principles and suggest a comprehensive understanding of the when-question.

Organizational decisions are characterized by a multiplicity of choice criteria. This property, which in reality affects virtually all human behaviors, prevents use of the standard (neoclassical) theory of decisions based on the maximization of a single criterion. Rather, the outranking methods developed by the French school of operational research make it possible to deal with multicriterial choices and avoid the defects of the naive method. This paper develops a paradigmatic example in order to show the essential effects of the outranking methods and their compatibility with the theory of limited rationality and satisfactory choices.

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.

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.

How important is competition in the product market to the economic performance of the firm? How important is the corporate governance structure of the firm to its performance? How does external competition interact with corporate governance to influence firm performance? These questions are posed in a dramatic way in transition economies because product market competition and profit-seeking organizations with new ownership structures were both introduced within a short time period. This paper does not answer these questions. Its aim is to bring together the several often separate literatures that discuss the issues. In the first part, the competition-performance link in theory and empirical work is examined. In the second part, the ownership and governance structures in the firm and in particular, those that affect the key performance-related decision-making processes are investigated. In the third part, the sparse attention given in the literature to the possible interaction between external market pressures and corporate governance structures is considered. In each section, reference is made first to the theory and evidence from outside transition and second to transition-specific models and evidence.