Beyond the “silo view” of strategic management and corporate governance: evidence from Fiat,Telecom Italia and Unicredit

While corporate governance and strategic management have for a long time suffered from artificial separation and, therefore, generally been tackled in a secluded manner, their combined organizational impact makes them stringently related to one another in the firms’ evolution. In this paper, we argue that, transcending the “silo view” of corporate governance and strategic management, time has come to acknowledge that, depending on circumstances and time periods, within a firm is possible to detect the relative dominance of corporate governance over strategic management, rather than the leadership of strategic management over corporate governance. Drawing on a contingency approach, we dissect the relationships (and the mechanisms that control it) between the strategic function (i.e., which defines the firms’ strategy and supervisions its implementation) and the governance function (i.e., the congruence assessment between the firm strategy selected and the interests of the ownership and of other relevant stakeholders represented in the board of directors and the effectiveness appraisal of the entrepreneurial action). Then, by performing a thorough retrospective qualitative analysis of three relevant case-histories of Italian firms (Fiat, Telecom Italia and Unicredit) operating in three different industries (automobile, banking and telecommunications), we surmise that, either in corporate governance (board) oriented or in strategic management (CEO) oriented companies, the ‘real’ problems arise when the quality of corporate governance or strategic management is poor. Interestingly, we eventually suggest to adopt a value-based approach to the relationship between corporate governance and strategy that may fruitfully complement the contingency perspective taken at the onset of the work.     

Integrating strategic issues into strategic management

The notion of a ‘strategic issues’ is rather pervasive in the field of planning in both conceptual [5, 19] and practical contexts. For instance, sometime ago the Wall Street Journal [41] reported that at least 50 large firms have created positions of ‘issues management director’; a dramatic increase in the number of such positions. ‘True’ strategic issues have a readily apparent importance to any organization; yet the process of identifying such issues and of integrating them into strategic planning and management is not well developed. Most treatments of strategic issues deal only with specific segments of the overall process through which relevant issues may be initially identified and finally translated into appropriate strategy [e.g. 5, 17]. This paper demonstrates that it is practical to develop a comprehensive process of ‘strategic issue management’ (SIM) that will facilitate the systematic identification, assessment and analysis of such issues. Such a process can ensure that issue-related factors are fully integrated into the formulation and implementation of strategy and plans. As such, SIM is a process whereby strategic issues may become an integral element of strategic management.     

Environmental scanning—Does it help the chief executive?

Firms must correctly identify and analyze the nature of their strategic environments, their strategic oppurtunities and problems, and, formulate the precise strategy sets for corporate strategy for accomplishing the chosen organizational objectives and goals. This articles reports on a survey. Chief executives of industrial corporations provided their insights and experience (see Appendix I) and the findings are analyzed for the implications for other practising chief executives. The nature of environment which is strategic to a particular firm has considerable influence upon the firm's choice of strategies. The correct understanding of this influence is critical to the firm's organizational effectiveness. Only after a correct understanding can the chief executive formulate the precise mix of strategies and meld them in the strategy sets of the corporate strategy.The major findings indicate that the levels of difficulty experienced in accomplishing firm's objectives and goals depend upon the perceived nature of complexity, unpredictability and dynamism of the firm's strategic environments. The levels of clarity on strategic issues also depend upon these same attributes of environments. The formulation of strategy sets of corporate strategy are indicative of the ways by which the chief executive and his management team expect the firm to achieve its major objectives and goals by monitoring the strategy sets to keep in tune with the changing realities of the firm's strategic environments. General management, marketing and finance, were the vital group strategies, followed by production and research and development. External relations, personnel and procurement were the least important strategies. Firms operating in simple and stable environments experienced the least difficulty in achieving corporate goals, while firms in dynamic and complex environments experienced the greatest difficulty.     

Building Organizational and Scientific Platforms in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Process Perspective on the Development of Dynamic Capabilities

In this paper, we examine the process of dynamic capability development in a large pharmaceutical firm. Using interviews with multiple managers at different organizational levels, we developed two narratives of the process of developing two separate dynamic capabilities in the same firm. We focus on three areas that prior research has shown to be critical in the early stages of the process of implementing new strategic initiatives: the cognitive orientations of key personnel, managerial action undertaken within the firm, and the firm's internal and external contexts. We provide evidence that managers undertake specific initiatives based on their own particular cognitive orientations , and that senior managers play a major role in the development of capabilities by imprinting the organization with their specific cognitive orientation and then orchestrating the multilevel organizational routines necessary for actualization of a capability. These replicable actions by senior management during the early stages of capability development can lead to the development of a capability that is not initially in the cognitive frames of lower level employees. Finally, we will show that internal and external contingencies have a profound impact on the decision to develop a capability, and to discontinue its development. Our findings thus suggest that the process of developing new capabilities shares common elements with other strategic initiatives.     

Strategy implementation: A review and an introductory framework

Effective strategy implementation is a critical component of organizational success and a potential source of competitive advantage. However, despite many calls for increased attention, research on the subject remains a disparate constellation of recommendations, case studies, and empirical work that provides insight but lacks a cohesive framework. As a result, strategy research most often treats implementation as a black box and overlooks sources of performance heterogeneity derived from differences in strategy implementation effectiveness. To improve our understanding of the strategy implementation process, and to promote its inclusion in strategy research, the authors systematically review and synthesize findings in the extant strategy implementation literature to abductively derive an integrative framework comprised of three components: (1) actions through which managers influence the implementation process, (2) conditions necessary for strategy implementation effectiveness, and (3) the underlying dynamic managerial capabilities to create the best possible combination of conditions by enacting the most appropriate managerial actions. By explaining the relationships among these three components, we provide an introductory foundational framework on which to build future knowledge about this important field of inquiry.     

董事会对公司战略过程评价:逻辑架构与指标体系

公司的战略管理是所有管理活动的重中之重.它包括战略判断、计划与预算活动、战略执行以及适威Adaptive)与交互(Interactive)性的战略控制体系.而现代公司治理原则要求董事会应关注和评价公司的战略管理活动.本文进一步认为,在资本市场不够发达的情况下,董事会应关注公司战略管理的奎过程为此,我们提出了一个针对公司战略管理体系有效性评价的基本框架和评价指标体系,目的在于使公司治理有效地作月于管理过程,最终为企业创造价值.     

Fit in strategic information technology management research: an empirical comparison of perspectives

The impacts of information technology on business performance has been a focus of research in recent years. In this regard, contingency models based on the notion of “fit” between the organization's management of IT, its environment, strategy, and structure seem to show promise. Six perspectives are examined as they pertain to the relationships between the firm's environmental uncertainty, its strategic orientation, its structure, its strategic management of IT, and its performance, namely moderation, mediation and matching as bivariate approaches to fit, and covariation, profile deviation and gestalts as systems approaches. These relationships are analyzed by means of an empirical study of 110 small enterprises. Results obtained from applying and comparing the six perspectives illustrate their significant differences and confirm the need for conceptual and methodological rigor when applying contingency theory in strategic information technology management research.     

Building dynamic capabilities for digital transformation: An ongoing process of strategic renewal

In this qualitative study, we explore how incumbent firms in traditional industries build dynamic capabilities for digital transformation. Digital transformation has been defined as the use of new digital technologies, such as mobile, artificial intelligence, cloud, blockchain, and the Internet of things (IoT) technologies, to enable major business improvements to augment customer experience, streamline operations, or create new business models. In making sense of digital transformation, we discovered that leaders in various industry circles use the term inconsistently to describe various strategizing and organizing activities; in addition, the term has gained limited scholarly attention as a context for study of strategic change. Drawing on senior executives' experiences with leading digitalization projects at incumbent firms, we propose a process model comprising of nine microfoundations to reveal the generic contingency factors that trigger, enable, and hinder the building of dynamic capabilities for digital transformation. Our findings reveal that digital transformation is an ongoing process of using new digital technologies in everyday organizational life, which recognizes agility as the core mechanism for the strategic renewal of an organization's (1) business model, (2) collaborative approach, and eventually the (3) culture.     

Strategic monitoring of port authorities activities: Proposal of a multi-dimensional digital dashboard

Abstract

The consequence of port evolution is that port authorities (PA) around the world are modifying their nature and their role, acquiring more and more an active role in the governance of logistic systems and are often adopting managerial and entrepreneurial behaviours. This new role of PA requires the adoption of a complex approach to monitoring the performance of the single stakeholders and of the whole port. Existing studies on port performance consider only specific indicators of port performance such as operational and financial efficiency neglecting aspects like customer satisfaction, port security and port sustainability. This paper tries to fill this literature gap: (i) outlining an integrated multi-dimensional dashboard to monitor port performance in a strategic perspective; (ii) analysing the role of digital technology to support the PA in the implementation of the monitoring dashboard; (iii) defining the evolutionary stages of tools implementation in the strategic monitoring of PAs.     

How French managers deal with radical change

Top management are increasingly concerned with the flexibility of their companies and with the problem of implementing strategy. This article presents a model of strategic change derived from the managers' experience and perceptions in some companies which achieved radical transformation. Indepth studies were carried out in four diverse companies. The experience of top managers revealed that the management of strategic change required an integrated approach to six interrelated areas—formulating a strategic project, managing the development of resources and skills, negotiating with the environment increasing internal communication of strategy, dealing with power, influencing the norms of behaviour and developing a team of transformation-minded managers.     

Private and Public Sector Models for Strategies in Universities*

Increasing formalization of disciplined management of UK universities over the last 30 years has been accompanied by moves to articulate universities' strategies, by attempts to connect organizations' plans and management of activity to those strategies and by a desire to measure how well outcomes are fitted to universities' goals. In this complex change in the orientation of universities' management, lessons have been drawn from the contemporary development of the analysis of strategy and strategic process in commercial and, latterly, in public sector settings. It is argued that there have been very significant errors and weaknesses in the importation of such models of strategy, especially in the stress on strategic planning rather than strategic process and in the insensitivity of universities' planning to the underlying strategy process of the typical university. Most universities, it is argued, mistake planning – and even budgeting – for strategy itself, having failed to make proper sense of their own organizations' processes of generating strategies and putting them into practice. They have typically missed the crucial context of strategy and change. It is argued that there are crucial lessons to be learned from recent advances in theorizing about strategy in the private or commercial sector, particularly in relation to the development of modelling complex and path‐dependent systems; and it is argued strongly that universities' strategic process can fruitfully be analysed through the perspectives of real options analysis. This can also accommodate the richness of universities' traditions of strategy formation and implementation within ‘loose‐coupled’ organizations.     

The management of managers: A review and conceptual framework

The management of managers is an important contemporary concern, but the literature on the issue is not well integrated. This paper reviews key sources on the topic across organizational economics, human resource development and strategic human resource management. It presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for analysing how firms manage senior managers and for guiding future research, arguing that firms adopt different styles to attract–defend, develop–renew and motivate–harvest their senior managerial resource, depending on their contexts and choices that are made in the firm over time. The notion that some styles draw on early identification of élites while others treat management identification as more of an emergent problem is central to the typology. Within each of the styles identified, effectiveness in the management of managers hinges on recognizing and handling certain strategic tensions and problems.     

Hoshin Kanri: Implementing the Catchball Process

Involving employees in strategy deployment is an active topic of strategic management, but has been difficult to achieve in western companies. The methodology known as Hoshin Kanri has proved an effective strategy deployment process in Japan where it has been extensively applied for integrating strategy and Total Quality Management (TQM), but its adoption in the West has been low, except for a few innovatory companies. The application of Hoshin Kanri relies on a process called “catchball” to gain consensus on the deployment of Hoshin targets and measures in a team environment. This paper presents a process design based on an adaptation of the Delphi technique for the effective implementation of catchball, to reinforce the link between the corporate strategy and annual planning cycle. The catchball process described was implemented at the Rover Group, a UK-based automotive company, to develop the company's quality strategy based on Hoshin Kanri principles.     

Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?

While much of the literature on strategy and strategy as practice (SaP) focuses on traditional strategic tools, technologies and discursive practices of managers, this paper extends the understanding of strategic change implementation by proposing that mundane material tools, understood as text, translate global strategic discourse in ways that make sense to workers and orchestrate successful global strategy implementation at the local level. Based on a rich case study within one branch of a national bank, this paper demonstrates how a middle manager's materializing practices developed local strategy practice while simultaneously transforming work and producing strategic figures or indicators that satisfied senior management's global strategic change objectives. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) it advances the understanding of the multimodality of materiality by identifying the influence of three types of mundane tools produced locally by a middle manager as he performed his sense of the senior managers’ strategic discourse; (ii) it reveals how these three types of physical texts materialized the manager's sense of this discourse, facilitating frontline workers’ engagement and coupling materiality and orality in a coherent way that allowed workers to embody the company's global strategy in their ‘sayings and doings’; and (iii) it highlights the importance of managers’ ability to materialize a strategic discourse.     

Strategic planning in government-dependent businesses

As the role of government has expanded in various countries, standard distinctions between the public and private sectors have become blurred. This paper explores the special context within which strategic planning must take place in organizations with a very high dependence on government. Four types of government dependency are considered: ownership dependency (public enterprises); regulation dependency (private, regulated firms); input-dependency (e.g. non-profits dependent on state funding); and output-dependency (e.g. defence contractors who sell a considerable portion of their output to governments).Despite their seeming differences, all four types of government-dependent organizations (GDOs) experience five distinctive problems that seriously limit the relevance of traditional planning models (or what are often referred to as ‘rational, comprehensive models’). They are: fragmented strategic decision-making authority; heightened goal ambiguity; politicization of strategic decision-making; short-term orientation and internal bureaucratization.The concepts of strategy and strategic planning are as relevant to Government dependent organizations (GDOs) as they are to other kinds of firms, although the planning system has to be designed somewhat differently. Six tentative guidelines for designing the planning system in GDOs are presented in the paper: (1) plans must be ‘negotiated’ rather than ‘formulated’ in GDOs; (2) outsiders must be involved in the planning process; (3) socio-political issues must be integrated with technoeconomic tissues; (4) top management must play an active role in running the system, especially in managing interfaces with government; (5) the planning system should emphasize flexibility over discipline or rigor and (6) plans must be written up with the expectation that much of their contents could become public knowledge.The paper concludes with the view the GDOs may have a lot to learn from one another despite superficial differences in institutional status (public vs private) and nature of goals (for- profit vs not-for-profits).     

Strategic Planning in the Malawi Public Sector: Potential Tool for Progress or Regression?

The process of developing strategic plans in the public sector is regarded as one indicator of positive reform in the system. The assumption is that strategic planning ensures that (just like in the private sector) public sector organizations’ operations should cost less but deliver better service. Ultimately the argument is that public sector institutional governance and responsiveness to the citizenry is not only seen but felt. However, strategic planning has to be done in an appropriate manner for it to deliver. For instance an analysis of the underlying motives, the role of leadership in the process as well as the relevance or viability of the guiding strategic planning model significantly affect the nature of expected results. In the early 2000s, the Malawi public sector embarked on a serious drive towards strategic planning process as part of its reform package. In order to ascertain it’s potential to transform the Malawi public service, this paper focuses at critically analyzing the strategic planning process in the Malawi public sector by among other things asking: who initiated and led the process? What approach determined the process? What is the possible potentiality of the adopted strategic planning approach in enhancing the reform agenda in Malawi? Based on interviews with senior officers in key Malawi public sector institutions, the paper concludes that the strategic planning process is ‘transitional and fluid’ hence lacks the clout to effectively enhance reforms in this sector. Another finding is that lack of effective leadership has largely contributed to the status quo.     

Socio-cognitive processes in strategy formation – A conceptual framework

This paper should set the frame for the management focus by introducing the cognitive perspective in management research. The cognitive view has become a considerable perspective in describing and explaining strategic processes and significant advances have been provided especially in the last decade. However, the primary concern of cognitive-oriented strategy process research is still on strategic decision-making and therefore lags behind encompassing conceptional developments in process research. By drawing on the “genesis” approach of Kirsch, this paper develops a framework for explaining the formation of shared strategic orientations from a socio-cognitive perspective, which should broaden the “dominant research design”.     

The strategic role of Human Resource Development in managing core competencies

The Resource-Based View (R-BV) of strategy emphasizes the importance of core competencies as the critical basis for sustainable competitive advantage. Yet, discussions of strategy typically ignore the role of the Human Resource Development (HRD) function in core competency development and management. The literature on strategic HRD is reviewed to locate the R-BV as a basis for redefining HRD's role in organizational strategy. Three strategic roles for the HRD function in core competency management are proposed and discussed: participating in strategic planning, developing core competencies, and protecting them. Specific tasks for each role are proposed. The final section identifies needs for further research as well as the practical implications from this discussion.     

Developing strategic thinking in senior management

Chief Executive Officers have recently stated that their greatest staffing challenge for the 1990s is the development of strategic leadership in their senior management. In order to do this, it is necessary to identify the substance of strategic thinking, and the capabilities that must be mastered. Writers on strategy have identified six major elements of strategic thinking and these have been organized to reveal the tasks, questions, decisions, and skills that senior executives must acquire in order to lead their organizations strategically. Finally, the article identifies training programme elements which are used by Directors of Manpower Development to develop strategic leadership ability.     

Strategic Cognition of Operations Executives

The nature of operations executives’ strategic cognition, as the antecedent to their choices about operations strategy, remains underexplored in the literature. This mixed‐methods study examines executives’ thinking about supply chain strategy through the lens of managerial cognition. Our qualitative study at a pharmaceutical distributor, which examined 25 executives’ outlook on the future of the turbulent U.S. healthcare sector and their suggestions for adapting the company's supply chain strategy to that future, suggests that an executive's strategic cognition can be defined by its regulatory focus—whether the executive envisions the future environment in terms of opportunities or threats—and the level of optimism in regards to the envisioned future. We propose a typology that predicts the strategic choices of operations executives based on four types of cognition: pioneering, pushing, protective, and provocative. It describes whether an executive's strategic choices target traditional or novel sources of revenue, and if they seek to influence either the firm's structure and practices or its environment. Our empirical test of the typology using quantitative data collected in a survey of senior operations executives supports the study's propositions associating three of the four types of cognition with their respective preferred strategic choices.