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Volledige samenvatting Organizations and Environment
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This is a complete summary of both the book and the lectures of the Organizations and Environment course.
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Summary of O&E book and lecturesChapter 1 and lecture 1
Here we see the school that are going to be discussed in the book, followed by their view of
strategy formation.
Prescriptive schools: more concerned with how strategies should be formulated than with
how they necessarily do form.
Design school: strategy formation is a process of informal design.
Planning school: formalized that perspective, seeing strategy making as a more
detached and systematic process of formal planning.
Positioning school: focuses on the selection of strategic positions in the economic
marketplace.
Descriptive schools: describing how strategies do, in fact, get made.
Entrepreneurial school: strategy is a creation of vision by the great leader
(entrepreneur).
Cognitive school: seeks to use the messages of cognitive psychology to enter the
strategist’s mind.
Learning school: complex world, strategies must emerge in small steps, as an
organization adapts or ‘learns’.
Power school: strategy formation is a process of negotiating while facing the external
environment.
Cultural school: strategy formation is a fundamentally collective and cooperative
process.
Environmental school: strategy formation is a reactive process in which the initiative
lies not inside the organization, but with its external context.
Configurational school: strategy formation exists of constant and transformation
periods.
,Strategy requires a number of definitions (5 P’s)
1. Plan: a direction, a guide or course of action into the future, a path to get from here
to there. Looking ahead.
2. Pattern: consistency in behavior over time. Looking at past behavior.
3. Position: the locating of particular products in particular markets.
4. Perspective: an organization’s fundamental way of doing things. the interpretation of
managers of the organization and its environment. This is the internal view of the
marketplace, what is the goal of the organization.
5. Ploy: a specific ‘manoeuvre’ intended to outwit an opponent or competitor.
Intended strategy: developed plans for the future.
Realized strategy: evolved patterns of the past.
Deliberate strategy: intentions that are fully realized.
Unrealized strategy: intentions that aren’t fully realized.
Emergent strategy: where a pattern is realized was not expressly intended.
Umbrella strategy: the broad outlines are deliberate, while the details are allowed to emerge
en route.
Strategy formation process
strategy is formed by humans, and
therefore is subject to biases.
Chapter 2 and lecture 2
The design school is a process of conception, it sees strategy as a perspective.
The design school proposes a model of strategy making that seeks to attain a match, or fit,
between internal capabilities and external possibilities.
,Implementation: building policy into the organization’s social structure.
The origins of the design school lay between 1960’s and the 1980’s, when the planning and
the positioning school took over.
The basic design school model
The design school has an emphasis on the SWOT model, by looking at the strengths and
weaknesses in the internal analysis and the opportunities and threats in the external
analysis. It is about the internal capabilities and the external changes.
Managerial values: the beliefs and preferences of those who formally lead the organization.
Social responsibility: the ethics of the society in which the organization functions, at least as
these are perceived by its managers.
Strategy formation is a ‘creative act’. There are more than one strategy is formulated, and
these are evaluated and a choice of the best strategy is made. If this decision is made, the
strategy is implemented. The evaluation is made with the following tests:
Consistency: the strategy must not present mutually inconsistent goals and policies.
Consonance: the strategy must represent an adaptive response to the external
environment and to the critical changes occurring within it.
Advantage: the strategy must provide for the creation and/or maintenance of a
competitive advantage in the selected area of activity.
Feasibility: the strategy must neither overtax available resources nor create
unsolvable subproblems.
Strategies should be clear, simple and specific.
Premises of the design school
1. Strategy formation should be a deliberate process of conscious thought. It is a tight
controlled process of human thinking, and this human thinking must be learned
formally.
2. Responsibility for that control and consciousness must rest with the CEO: that person
is the strategist. This means that other organizational members and external actors
are excluded from the process altogether (except for the board of directors).
3. The model of strategy formation must be kept simple and informal.
, 4. Strategies should be one of a kind: the best ones result from a process of
individualized design. Strategies are tailored to the specific situation of an individual
case and build on a distinctive competence.
5. The design process is complete when strategy appears fully formulated, as a
perspective. It is ready to be implemented.
6. The strategy should be explicit, so they have to be kept simple. They should be
articulated so that others in the organization can understand them.
7. The strategy can only be implemented when the unique, full-blown, explicit, and
simple strategy is fully formulated. Thinking is clearly separated from acting. This
means that structure must follow strategy.
The CEO of the organization is the strategist and must therefore gather, analyze, and organize
information, and with that information formulate the strategy.
Critique on the design school
The design school sees strategy formation above all as a process of conception rather than as
one of learning. Can organizations really be sure of their strengths without testing them?
An organization’s structure is a significant part of its past, which will influence the strategy,
this means that structure influences strategy as well, so structure doesn’t fully follow
strategy. Strategy determines long-term goals and objectives, the course of action and the
allocation of resources, so this takes consideration of the current structure.
How can a company come to grips with a changing environment, when its strategy is already
known? Explicit strategies are blinders designed to focus direction and so to block out
peripheral vision.
Data can’t be aggregated and transmitted up the hierarchy without significant loss or
distortion of the information. In dynamic environments, thinking and acting should be done
by the same groups of people, and simultaneously. As the implementor formulates, the
organization learns.
Context and contribution of the design school
1. One brain can, in principle, handle all of the information relevant for strategy
formation. This means an organization could make a grand design.
2. That brain is able to have full, detailed, intimate knowledge of the situation in
question. He or she can only know the organization by truly being in the organization.
3. The relevant knowledge must be established before a new intended strategy has to
be implemented – in other words, the situation has to remain relatively stable or at
least predictable. Individual learning has to come to an end before organizational
action can begin.
4. The organization in question must be prepared to cope with a centrally articulated
strategy.
The design school model would seem to apply best at the junction of a major shift for an
organization, coming out of a period of changing circumstances and into one of operating
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