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How do firms cope with changing environments? Is flexibility really the solution? Based on an Igor Ansoff Award winning study, Building the Flexible Firm shows how flexibility has become the new strategic challenge for contemporary firms. Offering a wealth of insights and based on extensive interviews with practitioners, Henk Volberda provides a strategic framework which explains what types of flexibility are effective under different organizational conditions and environmental characteristics. He also demonstrates an integrated method for diagnosing a firm's flexibility and for guiding the transition to greater flexibility and responsiveness.
How do firms cope with changing environments? Is flexibility really the solution? How can we measure a firm's flexibility? Can a more flexible firm be created? Based on an Igor Ansoff Award-winning study and now available for the first time in paperback, Henk Volberda's Building the Flexible Firm shows how flexibility has become the new strategic challenge for contemporary firms. Although traditional organizational forms have worked well in the relatively stable environments of the past, the globalization of markets, rapid technological change, shortening product life cycles, and increasing aggressiveness of competitors have radically altered the ground rules for competing in the 1990s and beyond. Increased competition forces firms to move more quickly and boldly than before, and to experiment in ways that do not conform to traditional administrative theory. This book offers a wealth of insights into the way firms can increase their flexibility. It is based on extensive interviews with practitioners and supported by many longitudinal case studies on flexibility improvement within large corporations. The author provides a strategic framework which explains what types of flexibility are effective under different organizational conditions and environmental characteristics. He also demonstrates an integrated method for diagnosing a firm's flexibility and for guiding the transition to greater flexibility and responsiveness.
Bang & Olufsen, the famous Danish producer of high-end home electronics, is well known as an early exponent of value-based management: the idea that there should be consistency in what the organisation does, a certain continuity between what the company develops and sells, and the beliefs and practices of the employees. This study investigates how company values are communicated and the collective identity is articulated through the use of such concepts as 'culture', 'fundamental values', and 'corporate religion', as well as how employees negotiate these ideas in their daily working lives. As this book reveals, the identification of values, meant to create cohesion and solidarity among employees, came to symbolise and engender a split between the staff and the other parts of the company. By examining the rise and fall of the value-based management approach, this volume offers the indispensible insight of anthropological enquiry to expose how social realities challenge conventional management strategies and therefore must be considered in the development of new management techniques.
Businesses worldwide are faced with major challenges related to the progressive (and many times unavoidable) incorporation of information technologies into their processes. Often, organizations don’t suitably react to the new requirements of these technologies, resulting in outdated policies, practices, and strategies. Human Resource Management in the Digital Economy: Creating Synergy between Competency Models and Information is a reference for both practitioners and academics that demonstrates how to implement e-management and competency models in companies. This book offers perspectives on the impact of integrated e-human resource policies and provides recommendations for addressing the shift from traditional human resource policies to new perspectives.
Includes papers that offer a review of inter-organizational relations in alternative approaches to the creation and management of competences. This volume offers an integrative approach to strategy and management theory, research, and practice.
This book focuses on the challenges of capacity building for flexible work organizations in Asia, and demonstrates how business enterprises practice reactive flexible capacity (in the form of adaptiveness and responsiveness) to cope with changing and uncertain business environments. The book provides examples of how this can be achieved by means of various organizational change initiatives, leadership strategies, re-engineering, innovation in products and processes, the use of information and communication technology, reshaping learning orientations, and more. As these topics are supported by research and case studies situated in different sectors and countries across Asia, the book will provide a useful resource for a broad readership including: management students and researchers, practicing business managers, consultants, and professional institutions.
This book provides a conceptual framework for systemic flexibility and business agility, drawing on a basis of research/case applications in various types of flexibility and agility in business. The selected papers address a variety of issues concerning the theme of systemic flexibility and business agility and are organized into following five parts: (i) Systemic and Strategic Flexibility; (ii) Information and Business Agility; (iii) Flexibility, Innovation and Business Excellence; (iv) Flexibility in Value and Supply Chains; and(v) Financial Flexibility and Mergers & Acquisitions. Flexibility and agility in business are emerging as key dimensions of business excellence that encompass the requirements of both choice and speed. The two concepts, flexibility and agility, have been used in multiple ways and often interchangeably, both in literature and in practice. The growing need for flexibility/agility in business can be seen from reactive as well as proactive perspectives. A business enterprise is expected to possess reactive flexibility/ agility (as adaptability and responsiveness) in order to cope with the changing and uncertain business environment. It may also endeavor to intentionally generate flexibility/agility as a strategic change in a variety of ways, such as leadership change, reengineering, innovation in products and processes, use of information and communication technology, and learning orientation.
The global business environment is highly uncertain, fractured by unforeseen events and making decisions that deal with a largely unknown future - organizations must improve their ability to respond. This volume of articles presents a new set of studies that attempt to better understand and address this very need.
The author explores determinants of organisational flexibility in this examination of four family-owned companies, two flexible and two less flexible, from the edible oil and pharmaceutical industries. By means of an innovative analysis - including longitudinal analysis, coding analysis, statistical analysis and the use of original display charts - he illustrates the determinants of organisational flexibility and sheds light on the process of transformation and adaptation of family firms, an area that has not yet been the subject of extensive empirical inquiry. The management literature has claimed that the complexity of business contexts has forced firms to confront hypercompetitive or high-velocity environments. Behind such claims lies a new interest in the dynamics of adaptation, and in particular a firm¿s flexibility as a way of adjusting under conditions of uncertainty. The businesses studied here have had to contend with the environmental volatility that characterized Argentina for some years. The author identifies five determinants of flexibility as a set of organisational and managerial capabilities that enabled some firms to adapt quickly in a highly competitive environment: heterogeneity of the dominant coalition, centralisation and formalisation of decision-making, low macroculture embeddedness, environmental scanning, and a strong organisational identity. These findings were analyzed and interpreted by developing theoretical ideas from three areas between which historically there has been no interface: organisational flexibility, organisational innovativeness and institutional embeddedness. This insightful examination into what enables some family-owned businesses to survive and thrive and causes others to fail will be of interest to academics concerned with business flexibility and adaptation, as well as to managers and owners of family businesses.
Re-inventing Business Models concentrates on the how and when of business model innovation. It provides managers with menus to outperform competitors and helps them choose between improving the existing business model and radically renewing it. The conclusions are supported by the authors' own research and case studies.