Strategic management

Fundamentals of strategy

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I’m reading up on strategy literature these days, and I found this gem: “Fundamentals of strategy” and I’m very happy that I ordered and read it.

Johnson, Gerry et al. (2018) Fundamentals of Strategy (4th ed). Pearson Education M.U.A.

It’s written with clarity and has interesting examples. It uses a framwork from the preveously published “Exploring strategy” (2017).
The framework separates analysis of “strategic position”, “strategic choices” and “strategy in action” – and therefore separates between various analytical approaches to strategy: environment-analysis, capability, stakeholder-analysis, competitive, diversifying, structure, systems and change.
I find the book to be a clear and vivid introduction to the field of strategy including a showcase of classical and more recent strategic tools.

Recommended!

Organizational learning

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Crossan, M., Lane, H., & White, R. (1999). An Organizational Learning Framework: From Intuition to Institution. The Academy of Management Review,24(3), 522-537.

I’ve read it before, but enjoyed reading it again. The classic paper of Crossan, Lane and White on Organizational Learning is food for thought both for academia and practice-oriented organisations.

I enjoy the frameworks given in this paper: the four processes of learning which includes personal, group and organizational level : Intuiting (personal), Intepreting (personal), Integrating (group) and institutionalizing (organization). The paper effectively shown how these processes can interact to generate organizational learning. They maintain the importance of the individual being a cornerstone in the organizational learningprocess. However: routines, diagnostic systems and rules and procedures must develop as a result of the individual and group-level processes. This is where many organizations probably struggle. Thus institutionalization can lead to barriers for organizational learning.

For strategic management, this implies that all levels must be taken into account when developing and deploying strategy. As strategic management (SM) is more involved in the organization than classic strategic planning (Whittington, 2019), SM needs to link into learningprocesses on all levels.

The article has been cited 1650 times in academic texts. Which is quite a lot. And the popularity has been growing (Web of Science). Definitely one to read! Do you agree?

Milestone: paper accepted for publishing!

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Very happy that an article I have co-authored together with Åge Johnsen, Jan-Erik Johanson and Elias Pekkola has been accepted for publication in the journal “Administrative Science”: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336141649_Strategic_Management_in_Finnish_and_Norwegian_Government_Agencies

I put a lot of work into gathering data for the part of this article detailing strategic management in Norwegian government agencies and have learned a lot from collaborating with brilliant scholars.

Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to analyse the design and implementation of strategic planning and performance management in governmental agencies in two Nordic countries, Finland and Norway. The Nordic countries are an interesting study from a comparative perspective because while they are commonly assumed to have been high-intensity new public management reformers, they are commonly assumed also to have a distinct public management tradition. Moreover, these two countries are interesting to study because within the Nordic public management tradition, Finland and Norway represent two different public management traditions. Finland belongs to the Eastern Nordic public management tradition, with an emphasis on decentralisation and agency autonomy, while Norway belongs to the Western Nordic public management tradition, with an emphasis on hierarchical governance and hence much performance management and reporting. Therefore, we expected to find more decentralised strategic management and emphasis on evaluation in Finland and more central, planning-like strategic management and reporting in Norway. Our comparison shows that both countries had mandatory strategic planning and utilised decentralised strategic planning in government agencies. The stronger legal orientation in the public administration in Finland, however, made strategic changes more complicated in Finland than in Norway.