Search

This article explores the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) journey to strategic agility through successively shifting to three different strategic alignments over the last six decades and suggests that logical incrementalism may be an unappreciated driver of this process. Three successive alignment models exhibit important shifts in technology strategy, competencies, and values of the organization. The three phases of incremental changes in shifting from one alignment model to the next are the emergence of new approaches, the embeddedness of these approaches in particular contexts, and their expansion to other organizational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design thinking has emerged as an important way for designers to draw on rich customer insights to enhance their products and services. However, design thinking is now also beginning to influence how corporate managers bring customer data into their day-to-day strategic planning. We call this integration of design thinking into the practice of strategic management "Design-Led Strategy" and show how it complements but extends current design-thinking perspectives. Adopting a strategy-as-practice perspective, this article identifies four archetypal practices that managers can use to strategize with design-thinking content. Its findings provide insight into the practices associated with situating design thinking within organizational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research summary: How firms respond to the emergence of dominant platforms that undermine their competitiveness remains a strategic puzzle. Our longitudinal study shows how one incumbent, Cisco, responded to such a challenge by creating a new platform, Fog, without undermining the dominant platform, Cloud, where it played a complementor role. By developing a process model we reveal how a firm in a peripheral role in a platform ecosystem can reposition itself through a dynamic mix of material, symbolic and institutional actions to develop and legitimize an alternative platform. This can be done first through symbiosis with the dominant platform, then partial competition with it. We theorize the value of a mutualistic "rising tide lifts all boats" strategy in contrast to hostile "winner takes all" approaches. Managerial summary: The increasing pervasiveness of digital platforms are driving established firms to reboot their strategy to embrace emergent forms of competition, collaboration, and mutual coexistence. Fearing disruption in their traditional business models, firms may decide to jump into the platform game. However, this is not straightforward since they do not want to go head-to-head with existing platforms and alienate their partners and customers by being perceived as encroaching on their turf. We describe one way that established technology firms are overcoming this dilemma through a "rising-tide-lifts-all-boats" strategy to cultivate new platforms. We show the value of seemingly inconsistent and dynamic approaches toward strategic communication and investments firm can use to lead new platforms without facing backlash from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long acknowledged the importance of unveiling the black box of Operational Research (OR) practice. However, despite the emerging empirical studies in the area known as "Behavioural OR", there is still a dearth of research into how artefacts are used at the micro-level of OR practice. This article addresses this gap by using adaptive structuration theory (AST) to study the appropriation (use) of artefacts during a facilitated modelling (FM) workshop. We argue that the appropriation of artefacts from the workshop participants enables them to engage in negotiation of meaning with action implications effectively, but appropriation occurs at varying intensities (high, medium, and low) depending on the issue of concern. Moreover, we identify that artefacts are reproduced if their reproduction is an aim or part of an aim of strategic discourse. Finally, we outline the limitations of our study and future research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in rhetorical analysis by management scholars, the study of enthymemes or arguments‐in‐use, arguably the mainstay of rhetoric, has been scarce. We argue that enthymeme analysis holds promise in enabling researchers to access agents' shared beliefs, in turn shedding light on organizational processes. We draw from two key studies of enthymeme analysis; one interpretivist and one objectivist, to propose a mixed methods approach that combines the situationally‐specific, grounded insights of the former, with the confirmation, population validity aspects of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do paradoxical tensions become salient in organizations over time? Ambidexterity and paradox studies have, thus far, primarily focused on how tensions inside organizations are managed after they have been rendered salient for actors. Using a longitudinal, embedded case study of four strategic business units within a media organization, we theorize the role of the top management team leader’s practices in enabling tensions to become salient for their respective lower-level managers when there are initial differences in how tensions are interpreted across levels. Our findings extend a dynamic equilibrium model of organizing by adding interpretive context as an enabling condition that shapes the emergence of salience through the provision of a constellation of cues that guide sensemaking. Informed by a practice-based perspective on paradox, we also contribute a conceptual model of leadership as practice, and outline the implications for ambidexterity studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated objectives. An important response to such paradoxes is transcendence: the ability to view both poles of the paradox as necessary and complementary. Despite the centrality of transcendence to existing frameworks within the paradox literature, we still know little about its practice. We address this gap by surfacing and analysing rhetorical practices across three science organizations. We outline four rhetorical practices that constitute transcendence (Ordering, Aspiring, Signifying, and Embodying) as well as the underlying features of these practices that explain how they construct a response to paradox. In particular, we show that transcendence entailed balancing the enabling features of focus (paradoxical content/context), time (stability/change) and distance (maintaining/reducing). Finally, we develop a dynamic view of transcendence as a process of oscillation, showing how these practices are bundled together and interrelate to construct moments of transcendence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The 'gender gap' in academic medicine remains significant and predominantly favours males. This study investigates gender disparities in research performance in an Academic Health Science Centre, while considering factors such as mentoring and scientific collaboration.Materials and Methods: Professorial registry-based electronic survey (n=215) using bibliometric data, a mentoring perception survey and social network analysis. Survey outcomes were aggregated with measures of research performance (publications, citations and h-index) and measures of scientific collaboration (authorship position, centrality and social capital). Univariate and multivariate regression models were constructed to evaluate inter-relationships and identify gender differences.Results: One hundred and four professors responded (48% response rate). Males had a significantly higher number of previous publications than females (mean 131.07 (111.13) vs 79.60 (66.52), p=0.049). The distribution of mentoring survey scores between males and females was similar for the quality and frequency of shared core, mentor-specific and mentee-specific skills. In multivariate analysis including gender as a variable, the quality of managing the relationship, frequency of providing corrective feedback and frequency of building trust had a statistically significant positive influence on number of publications (all p<0.05).Conclusions: This is the first study in healthcare research to investigate the relationship between mentoring perception, scientific collaboration and research performance in the context of gender. It presents a series of initiatives that proved effective in marginalising the gender gap. These include the Athena Scientific Women's Academic Network charter, new recruitment and advertisement strategies, setting up a 'Research and Family Life' forum, establishing mentoring circles for women and projecting female role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To determine the association between professors' self-perception of mentoring skills and their academic performance.Design: Two hundred and fifteen professors from Imperial College London, the first Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) in the UK, were surveyed. The instrument adopted was the Mentorship Skills Self-Assessment Survey. Statement scores were aggregated to provide a score for each shared core, mentor-specific and mentee-specific skill. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to evaluate their relationship with quantitative measures of academic performance (publications, citations and h-index).Results: There were 104 professors that responded (response rate 48%). There were no statistically significant negative correlations between any mentoring statement and any performance measure. In contrast, several mentoring survey items were positively correlated with academic performance. The total survey score for frequency of application of mentoring skills had a statistically significant positive association with number of publications (B=0.012, SE=0.004, p=0.006), as did the frequency of acquiring mentors with number of citations (B=1.572, SE=0.702, p=0.030). Building trust and managing risks had a statistically significant positive association with h-index (B=0.941, SE=0.460, p=0.047 and B=0.613, SE=0.287, p=0.038, respectively).Conclusions: This study supports the view that mentoring is associated with high academic performance. Importantly, it suggests that frequent use of mentoring skills and quality of mentoring have positive effects on academic performance. Formal mentoring programmes should be considered a fundamental part of all AHSCs' configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas tensions arising from the pursuit of ambidexterity have been documented, how these are interpreted and managed by actors themselves remains largely unexplored. Based on in-depth case research in a large Scandinavian-based telecommunications organization pursuing ambidexterity, we identify a path-dependent process of tension interpretation and tension management at different levels of the organization. Our findings suggest that, in the context of an ambidextrous strategy, actors are actively involved in managing arising tensions based on their differing interpretations of these tensions (where ambidextrous demands are seen as complementary, conflicting or interrelated). We find that these interpretations are influenced by actors’ strategic orientation and organizational level. Our study extends understanding of the pursuit of ambidexterity in practice, offering a pluralist, path-dependent perspective of how actors perceive and deal with ambidexterity tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organizational ambidexterity literature conceptualizes exploration and exploitation as conflicting activities, and proposes separation-oriented approaches to accomplish ambidexterity; namely, structural and temporal separation. We argue that viewing ambidexterity from the lens of paradox theory enables us to move beyond separation-oriented prescriptions toward synthesis or transcendence of paradoxical poles; as well as toward longitudinal explorations of how paradoxical poles dynamically interrelate over time. In this way, the conceptual repertoire of ambidexterity theory is enriched and empirical research can more closely and pragmatically track practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do managers visually interact with strategy tools during workshops to produce knowledge about strategic issues? Building on the strategy-as-practice perspective and visual organization studies, we conceptualize workshops as arenas where visual interaction with strategy tools takes place. Following this approach, we examine how a top management team creates a strategy tool during a workshop (using primarily video data). Our findings reveal three distinctive patterns of visual interactions: shift, inertia, and assembly. We also show how each of these patterns is enabled by the affordances of the tool used. Our study contributes to theoretical elaborations of how actors visually interact with strategy tools, which offers extensions to the strategy-as-practice and visual organization literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do successive CEOs use myths in an organization over time? While studies start to provide us with understanding of the discourse employed by particular organizational actors, we lack studies about the discourse used by successive strategic actors over long periods of time and the precise mechanisms of such use. To address this gap we theorise the components of mythopoetical behaviour of CEOs and apply critical discourse analysis to unpack the discursive mechanisms used by three CEOs at Hewlett Packard over a 27-year period. We offer two contributions: first, we elaborate on the concept of mythopoetical behaviour (mythopoesis) and show how it forms part of the four discursive mechanisms of authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis that allow incoming CEOs to construct and legitimise their identity as strategic actors. Second, we develop the notion of mythopoetical distance to provide a method to examine how myths developed by CEOs are compared to the institutionalised myths in their firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategy teams have received little attention in the strategic management literature. The goal of this article is to fill this theoretical and empirical gap by studying the practices of strategy teams. Drawing upon an in-depth longitudinal case study of a FTSE-100 multi- business firm and evidence from 36 interviews, this study points to the importance of both actions and interactions of corporate centre and business unit strategy teams during the strategy process. Our study also shows that acting and knowing of these teams is dynamic, collective and distributed within the multi-business firm across two interrelated levels: within the team and across teams, each involving both recursive and adaptive activities. Our article is divided into three parts. The first outlines the theoretical and methodological issues for studying the practice of strategy teams in multi-business firms. In the second, our empirical findings are reported. Finally, the third part presents our contributions and some implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]