Organization and Strategy

"Since its very inception, social work has been considered an organizationally based profession, with the majority of its workforce employed within formal organizations. Whether in nonprofit, for-profit, or governmental agencies, the practical realities of human service organizations are a central element of professional social work. This book explores the climate and culture of these agencies and provides essential information for surviving and thriving in this setting. It prepares students for their future careers so that they will feel empowered in their work and be able to fulfill their responsibilities toward organizational, community, and social change. Using real-life examples, the authors examine the internal structures of management, financing, and supervision and discuss common conflicts between agencies and professionals. The book’s straightforward tone and practical advice make it an asset to anyone entering human service organizations.

This new edition contains updated examples, case studies, and references. It also contains valuable information on the effects of the recent financial crisis on human service organizations. Agencies now face increased caseloads and more complex social problems with fewer resources and less money. Understanding how these events have changed the nature of human service organizations will allow students to be better prepared for the work ahead of them.

Features

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Expanded content on the practical aspects of organizational theory and suggestions for developing leadership skills
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Updated examples, case studies, and references throughout the book
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Key points and discussion questions following each chapter
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Updated instructor’s manual available online as a PDF or Word document"

The case below was originally drafted and developed by a group of scholars in their monumental book " Business Policy: Managing Strategic Processes ". In that book, Bower, Bartlett, Uyterhoeven, and Richard highlight many key cases worth reading by every Strategist. In the majority of instances, these cases cover over 15 pages of fine print. This paper highly summarizes these many pages into a little over two pages. Principally, the Asahi Breweries case highlights strategic maneuvers that a Breweries company engaged in to get or recover the once lost dominant share of the Japanese market. These lessons are valuable for every Strategist, despite different contexts and circumstances that confront them.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Este libro habla sobre los momentos de cambio, sobre cómo prepararse para las bifurcaciones de la historia, sobre estos momentos de apertura, de riesgos, de oportunidades y amenazas que definen un nuevo paisaje de desarrollo. Cómo preparase para el momento en que procesos latentes, marginados, negados irrumpen en la “historia oficial” y abren el futuro a estados posibles.

This paper is aimed to outline a strategy for organising a new state agency whose main mandate is to deal with the problem of drug trafficking in the Balakash Republic, taking into account the particularity of the context and it should be made up with elements of the existing institutions and must be capable of collaborative work with other government agencies and deliver quick and demonstrable results.
To do so, the strategy must contain: i) the role and functions of the new agency, ii) the overall structure, iii) the accountability system, iv) and the strategy for delivering results.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

Corrupt exchanges are often brokered by a third party, but this phenomenon has not been satisfactorily explored by researchers of corruption. Literature on brokerage in general provides interesting models but they have not previously been applied to corrupt exchanges. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with respondents who participated in actual corrupt transactions, this paper identifies several distinct brokerage types in low-level corruption in contemporary Hungary. The paper also provides explanation of variation in corruption brokerage in terms of actors' group affiliations, forms of the corrupt exchanges, brokerage mechanisms, as well as neutrality, benefit and motivation, risk distribution, and stability of the brokerage structure. Finally, we discuss some policy implications of corruption brokerage.

The report presents some of the most commonly used techniques for each of the six Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (CPE) enabler categories. Examples are given of tools, measures and competencies for each of the techniques and they are linked to CPE scoring bands where this is valid. By understanding the scope and limits of the techniques and tools, which are based on a range of management theories, managers can select appropriate tools for their business context and apply them successfully in a Business Excellence program.

Purpose – Recent operations management research suggests that adopting and implementing the right practices are essential to attaining “world-class” performance. The purpose of this paper is to report the leading operations management practices and the strategy deployment framework that emerged from a qualitative study that addressed the question of how managers implement strategy in an organisational excellence environment.
Design/methodology/approach – Group work with managers responsible for implementing strategic initiatives was followed by case studies of seven organisations via in-depth semi-structured interviews. A survey questionnaire strengthened the validity of the constructs of strategy deployment that were identified in the case analyses.
Findings – In total, seven strategy deployment constructs were identified and linkages between them are described. The 50 leading deployment practices indicate a mix of hard and soft management skills applied across the seven constructs.
Practical implications – The leading deployment practices have the potential to raise the performance of organisations by improving the implementation of strategic initiatives. The framework is relevant to the deployment of both corporate and business unit strategy such as manufacturing or operations, and should be of interest to managers in these areas.
Originality/value – Researchers have noted for more than a decade that no generally accepted framework of operations management practices has emerged for strategy implementation. Most strategy studies have focused on strategy formulation, content, or on project/programme management. There have been few multiple case studies of leading strategy deployment practices in diverse organisations from both private and public sectors.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

Tulisan ini dibuat untuk memberikan gambaran mengenai manajemen stratejik yang ada di perusahaan, khususnya perusahaan terbuka yang dapat dianalisa kinerjanya. Materi yang ada berupa saran atau ide yang dapat memberikan gambaran strategis bagi perusahaan pada masa mendatang berdasarkan informasi historis yang tersedia.

"This book offers annotated translations of documents touching on Dutch admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge and his voyage to Asia between 1605 and 1608. These translations are aimed at a contemporary English-speaking Asian readership interested in the early modern history of European trade, warfare and expansion in Southeast Asia with a focus on Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Researchers specialising in early European colonialism, international law, international relations, security studies, and diplomatic history will also find that the documents translated in this volume offer new and unfamiliar perspectives. Materlieff’s business acumen, military and diplomataic prowess as well as his vision of empire all have implications for examining not only European expansion into Southeast Asia, but also into other regions at large, including especially south Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Admiral Matelieff was a director of the Rotterdam Chamber of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) formed in 1602. He was appointed fleet commander on one of the company’s first voyages to Asia. Matelieff’s mission was both commercial and military: he launched a major sea-borne attack on the Portuguese colony of Melaka, arranged for the signing of treaties with the rulers of Johor, Aceh and Ternate, and founded the first Dutch fort on the island of Ternate. His endeavours, however, to open the Chinese market for the Dutch company proved unsuccessful.
Following his return to the Dutch Republic in September 1608, Matelieff penned a series of memorials and letters. In these he advanced recommendations for changing the way the company organized its fleets and conducted business. More importantly he offered  his Dutch contemporaries a vision of empire in Asia. The materials contained in this volume offer important observations of a perceptive analyst who was also determined to grasp the political and economic structures of Asia, and also of inter-state relations in across this vast region. At a time of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French and English engagement in Southeast Asia, Matelieff sought to critically assess and strategize on the ways in which Europeans were increasingly engaging with Asian polities and their rulers.

This book will be released for sale in Australasia and Europe in June 2014 and available in the Americas after September 2014
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Desde hace unos años, el ritmo de crecimiento del número de usuarios de Internet en América Latina ha ido incrementándose. Esto permite entrever la posibilidad de desarrollar, entre otras cosas, las aplicaciones más generales del Comercio Electrónico, sobre todo, entre las pequeñas y medianas empresas y consumidores locales o fuera del país. A pesar de esto, aun existe gran desconocimiento por parte de las empresas y consumidores de las ventajas y del uso de esta tecnología.

En esta investigación se identifican y describen las características principales del Internet, del Comercio Electrónico, de la Tienda Virtual, de las relaciones mercadológicas Empresa - Consumidor y de la región latinoamericana en materia de Comercio Electrónico basado en Internet. Así mismo en este trabajo se identifican las principales barreras y se dan algunas recomendaciones para fomentar la capacidad de América Latina en materia de Comercio Electrónico.

Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings contains the seminal articles from the growing body of research on megaproject planning and management along with an original introduction by the editor, Bent Flyvbjerg. The leading and most cited authority in the field, Flyvbjerg has used crowdsourcing and 25 years of experience to cherry-pick from several hundred articles and books the writings that define the field. This volume will be an indispensable source for those wishing to speak with authority about how megaprojects are prepared, delivered, and fought over. The target audience is students, academics, practitioners, and media pundits alike, as well as communities affected by megaprojects.

Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

The purpose of the article was 1) to assess the relationship between the organizational culture (OC) type and business strategy (BS); 2) to prove that OC influences the survival strategy success/implementation; 3) to contribute to the expansion of organizational theory by analyzing the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) strategy palette as the basis for developing an effective company survival strategy during the crisis. To achieve the purpose, correlation analysis between OC types (authors' typology) and BS (Boston Consulting Group and Miles & Snow Models) was used (561 employees of different industries participated in the survey; the data collected laid the foundation for the research). As a result, it was proved that 1) certain types of organizational culture correspond to certain types of strategies; 2) during the period when the company overcomes the recession, OC affects strategic innovation decisions; 3) building a sustainable business ecosystem enhances the positive impact. The main limitations of the study are 1) some elements of subjectivity assessment, 2) constant changes in OC and BS, 3) the probability of different subcultures coexistence.
Implications for a Central European audience: The results confirmed that there is a need for managers to 1) take into account the organizational culture characteristics/features to implement chosen strategies successfully; 2) be ready to adapt the OC before the BS is approved; 3) adopt the idea that building an innovation ecosystem can be crucial to confront the crisis with confidence.

This paper is a study of Public Private Partnerships as a product of intelligent design and strategy elements. It constructs an integrative theoretical framework for infrastructure PPPs based on a comprehensive literature review. The Public Private Partnership is a public policy entity, sired by economics and nurtured by specific instruments of finance. Therefore any attempt to identify the organizational design elements necessitates an integrative cross-disciplinary perspective. 
The paper begins with an apparently simple question in Part I: What is a Public Private Partnership? But it moves beyond definitions to distinguish today’s PPPs from public-private interaction over history, and from outsourcing, contracting-out and privatization.  A view of PPPs as a language game links it to New Public Management on the one hand, and also establishes our approach to PPPs as an organizational entity with defining characteristics on the other. Part II strengthens the theoretical framework connecting PPPs to NPM and Economics. It traces the changing view of organizations in Public Policy literature, from hierarchies to networks. This is paralleled by changes in economic thinking regarding the provisioning of public goods. Strategic Alliances, Resource Complementarity and the theory of Hybrid Organizations from Transactional Economics offer further rationale for PPPs. Part III continues the theme, dealing with the Risks associated with the ‘marriage of convenience’ between the private and public sectors.  The possibility of Cheating and Opportunism are seen in the light of Transactional Cost Theory, Agency theory and Strategic Alliances. Part IV looks at organizational design elements which mitigate risk through cooperation and collaboration. We first look at Governance mechanisms, including PPP structure and financial instruments of risk management. Part V and VI are a discussion of organizational Trust and the strategies flowing from it. Here we see PPP as a partnership and process, and examine various strategies to bring about trust between public and private players. Part VII shifts from analysing the bilateral interactivity between the public and private partners, and places the PPP in the wider landscape of its engagement with the citizenry and community through a study of Accountability and Public Interest issues. Part VIII studies the potential advantages & disadvantages of PPPs and where their use is appropriate. Part IX looks at the Indian scenario, with policy recommendations to foster successful partnerships.
The paper provides a useful theoretic framework to study PPPs. A modest contribution is its integrative view, combining the thinking in economics, public policy, organizational studies and finance to study PPPs. Secondly, it focuses attention not on the firm, but the Partnership, viewing it not as an entity, like a company, but a process. In doing so, it takes PPPs from the hard core of Economics and Finance, to the fuzzy pragmatism of Organizational Studies and Trust. Public Policy practitioners must integrate organizational thinking into the design and management of PPPs if the incubator PPP experiment is to succeed. Academic literature and practitioner experience of PPPs in India is limited today. Through a cross-disciplinary approach, this paper attempts to identify research gaps for further exploration, which is the substance of my concluding section.

As megaprojects have become ubiquitous, their real benefits and costs have come under increased scrutiny. We interviewed Bent Flyvbjerg, who has extensively studied megaproject development. Flyvbjerg has found systematic problems in the development process: by intentionally misrepresenting information and deliberately disregarding risks, proponents instigate projects that result in fewer benefits and higher costs than promised.

The Supplementary Green Book Guidance on Optimism Bias (HM Treasury 2003) with reference to the Review of Large Public Procurement in the UK (Mott MacDonald 2002) notes that there is a demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic and that to redress this tendency appraisers should make explicit, empirically based adjustments to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits, and duration. HM Treasury recommends that these adjustments be based on data from past projects or similar projects elsewhere, and adjusted for the unique characteristics of the project in hand. In the absence of a more specific evidence base, HM Treasury has encouraged departments to collect data to inform future estimates of optimism, and in the meantime use the best available data. In response to this, the Department for Transport (henceforth DfT), has contracted Bent Flyvbjerg in association with COWI to undertake the consultancy assignment "Procedures for dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning". The present Guidance Document is the result of this assignment.

What does it mean for organizations to be strategic? This question of the relation between organization and strategy is central in the field of strategy theory and is a matter of high practical significance for organizations. Yet, this relation has not been treated thematically in ontological terms. In theory, strategy is universally understood as an accidental property of organizations and is thus not accorded ontological significance. On the other hand, in practice, strategy is ubiquitous among organizations and is generally understood as normatively and existentially necessary, albeit in an unthematized way.
It is in understanding organizations as temporal that brings out most clearly that they incorporate an inherent engagement with the future. Approaching strategy as inherent to organizational being entails a shift from only thinking about organizations being strategic in behavioural terms, to admitting the possibility that organizations are strategic beings in ontological terms. Thinking along this line of questioning leads to the focal question of this study: what is the nature of organizational strategic being as an ontological unity?
This question is addressed in a hermeneutic phenomenology of organizational strategic being. Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is aimed at interpreting the full-fledged temporality of human being and is thus an ontological analogue for interpreting organizational strategic being in terms of its distinctive and equally full-fledged temporality. It is also an alternative to the prominent Whiteheadian-inspired and Weickian process perspectives, which also espouse the temporality of organizing as a central tenet. However, whereas these retrospective process perspectives lead to the relegation of strategy to epiphenomenal status, hermeneutic phenomenology is eminently suited to giving a futural processual account which takes strategy seriously in ontological terms.
In this study I develop, defend and explore the implications of the theses that organizational being (sein Gefragtes), as temporal, is an inherently strategic kind of being, and therefore, that organizational strategic being (ein Befragtes) is an ontological unity that is constituted in its distinctive temporality: organizational futurity (das Erfragte).
The interpretation of organizational futurity discloses a productive new perspective at the intersection of organizational ontology and organizational strategy theory. Organizational futurity is a conception that helps us to better understand the gap between strategy theory and practice, and avails a new basis for theorizing that might help to ameliorate this persistent gap. The descriptions of organizational futurity, and especially of its modes, will be practically relevant to organizations that exist as strategic beings under the contemporary condition of higher-order contingency. However, it also avails more incisive potentials for the critique of both strategy practice and theory in an age of organizational strategy.

"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.

Any organisation, whether it be that of a profit or a non-profit one needs to evaluate the environment in which it operates and there are several models such as Porter's five forces, swot analysis, PESTEL etc. which are being utilised by business organisations for an evaluation of the business environment, the competitive actions as well as the analysis of the sustainability of business operations and finally to develop a business strategy. The following report focuses mainly on the evaluation of the business environment of national history Museum which is a non-profit organisation, which gets funding from the government and voluntary donors in order to promote the cultural and historical heritage of the country. After the analysis of the business environment the stakeholder diagram is developed in order to identify the relative power of different stakeholders of national history Museum and how the actions of the museum will affect the stakeholders. Further on the report the key competencies of the national history Museum, the organisational culture and a comparison of the different issues faced by the national history Museum with that of a for-profit organisation such as the Grange hotels has been conducted.

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