Perspectives in Strategy: Mintzberg on the Influence of Ansoff

Executive Overview Constantinos Markides is Professor of Strategic and International Management and Chairman of the Strategy Department at the London Business School. A native of Cyprus, he received his B.A. (with distinction) and M.A. in economics from Boston University, and his M.B.A. and D.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He has worked as an associate with the Cyprus Development Bank and as a research associate at the Harvard Business School. Dr. Markides has published on the topics of strategic innovation, corporate restructuring, refocusing and international acquisitions. His book Diversification. Refocusing and Economic Performance, was published by MIT Press in 1995, and All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy, was published by Harvard Business School Press in 1999. A third book, based on a special issue on strategy of Sloan Management Review which he edited, will be published by Jossey-Bass next year. His publications have also appeared in such journals as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Directors & Boards, Leader to Leader, Long Range Planning, Business Strategy Review, British Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Strategic Management Journal and the Academy of Management Journal. He has taught in many in-company programs and is on the Academic Advisory Board of the Cyprus International Institute of Management. He is also a non-executive director of Amathus (U.K.) Ltd., a tour operating company. He is the associate editor of European Management Journal and is on the editorial board of Strategic Management Journal and The Academy of Management Journal. Dr. Markides is a member of the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society and is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His current research interests include the management of diversified firms and the use of innovation and creativity to achieve strategic breakthroughs.

This paper analyses the progress made in the field of strategic management over the past three decades. One approach to analysing a discipline’s trajectory is to explore its exemplary research. We review the papers awarded the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel, Strategic Management Society (SMS) Best Paper Award of the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) since 1993, to demonstrate the emergence of strategic management as a specific discipline with a distinct view of how firms generate competitive advantage. Our paper interprets the development of the discipline from its market-based and structural roots to attempts to decipher the ‘black box’ of the organisation in analysing capabilities, particularly dynamic capabilities, and resources. Our study shows how the conceptual breakthroughs of the exemplary papers are further developed by the field through theory testing and extension using increasingly sophisticated methodologies published by journals such as Irish Journal Of Management (IJM). Our review of both journals highlights that despite increasing market, social and cultural instability since these seminal papers were first conceived, their lessons are still relevant and increasingly critical to both theory and practice in establishing the future trajectory for strategic management and a framework for organisations to compete.

How do firms behave? Why are firms different? What are the functions of the headquarters unit in a multibusiness firm? What determines success or failure in international competition? In Fundamental Issues in Strategy, twenty-two prominent scholars collectively address these four fundamental questions to examine strategic management's roots and to strengthen the field's theoretical foundations. They take a comprehensive look at the intellectual backbone of the field of strategy, raising important issues that demand further research. The result is a compelling reexamination of strategic management that urges scholars to refocus their efforts now - and sets a research agenda for the coming decade. The editors, Richard P. Rumelt, Dan E. Schendel, and David J. Teece, organized this project specifically to encourage focus on fundamental questions of strategy; call for a significant increase in the sophistication, rigor, and scholarly quality of strategy research; demonstrate a fruitful interaction between strategy researchers and discipline-based scholars; and show the tremendous potential of the intersection of basic disciplines and strategy for gaining new insights and improving management practice and organizational performance. Indeed, by focusing on fundamental questions, the contributors reveal that disciplines like economics, organizational sociology, and political science as well as research on strategic management can - and should - shed new light on this important field. Fundamental Issues in Strategy is the product of a conference jointly sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through its consortium Competitiveness and Cooperation, The John M. OlinFoundation, UCLA Center for International Business Education and Research, and the Strategic Management Society. It frames a complete and original statement about the future of strategic management - and establishes a foundation for future growth and development in the field of strategy.

The 30th Annual International Conference of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) will be held, since the first time of its foundation, in Rome, on September 12–15, 2010. In the occurrence of this circumstance the Journal of Management and Governance (JMG) and the Italian Academy of Business Administration and Management (Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale—AIDEA) would like to propose to the conference’s participants an opportunity to know more about the Italian contribution to the growth and development of the strategic management studies. The panel proposed by the AIDEA and the JMG fits the aims and the scope of the 30th Annual International Conference of the SMS, that is devoted to offer an overview of the ‘‘state of the art’’ of the strategy studies, 30 years after the transition from the business policy to the strategic management. As responsible for the panel proposal and Editor of the JMG I was very pleased and honoured that our initiative was accepted and included within the Conference program. Our panel is devoted to explore some antecedents of the strategic management studies coming from the Italian literature on management. Due to the fact that the bulk of the existing literature is in Italian language, some of the most remarkable contributions are still unknown to a large international audience. More specifically, Italian scholars have been among the pioneers within the literature on corporate governance that got a worldwide attention only at the end of 80s, namely with the decline of public companies. Indeed, Italian scholars have studied other forms of governance (i.e., family firms, entrepreneurial firms, state-owned companies), alternative modes of governance between the single firm and the market (i.e., the networks of firms, the

The articles in this issues represent some of the best papers developed for the Strategic Management Society Conference in Catania, in August 2007, in addition to a few special inclusions. Concerned as a nexus that involves entrepreneurial individuals seizing and exploiting lucrative opportunities by either starting new ventures or renewing (to be continued...)

Continuing the emerging tradition of the Knowledge and Innovation (K&I) Interest Group at the Strategic Management Society (SMS) Conference to interview foundational scholars in strategic management, we invited Professor Michael Tushman from Harvard Business School (HBS) as our guest of honor this year. The interview provided a rare opportunity to get behind the scenes of the author’s much celebrated scholarly contribution to the field as well as his responses to some of the new findings within and across his work over time.

In this introductory essay to the Special Issue of Sinergie, our aim is first to portray the main features of the Strategic Management Society Special Conference entitled “New Frontiers of Entrepreneurship: Strategy Governance and Evolution” that was hosted on May 23-25, 2007 by the School of Economics and Business at the University of Catania. Second, we feature multiple roles of “agents of change” that management researchers and professors are increasingly called to assume in the current university landscape and will be even more often called to undertake as part of their general tasks in the future; i.e., the ones respectively of scientific entrepreneurs, knowledge brokers and managers of cultural events. Third, we eventually marshal some conclusions on the budding complexities in the responsibility range of management researchers and professor and how it is possible to deal with them.

This volume is about human capital resources (HCRs). Since the HCR construct is a newcomer to a long-standing literature on human capital (Becker, 1964), we begin with a brief historical thumbnail review of the history of research on HCR. We do so to provide a quick orientation to the focus of this volume: it is neither our intention nor hope to be exhaustive in this regard. Over the past 20 years, there has been an increasing convergence of scholarly disciplines exploring the association of human capital and organizational performance. Early gatherings at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Utah brought together arrays of scholars from diverse backgrounds who were interested in exploring the organizational effects and antecedents of human capital. As scholarly discourse at the intersection of these fields grew, researchers from strategic human resource management (HRM) and strategy disciplines combined to create the Strategic Human Capital Interest Group that first met in Rome in 2010 and has been one of the faster-growing interest groups of the Strategic Management Society (SMS). At this point, the HCR construct had not yet been articulated and defined. Its genesis came from the realization that the human capital construct had begun to take on different meanings in different literatures. Many scholars thought of human capital as something specifically owned by workers (i.e., “the individual’s human capital”), while others were focused on how workers contributed to organizational performance (i.e., “the firm’s human capital”). That is, some researchers (predominantly from the “micro” traditions of organizational behavior, organizational psychology, and human resource management) focused on the “human” and some researchers (predominantly from the “macro” traditions of strategy and economics) focused on the “capital.” Hence the term “human capital” was simultaneously being used too broadly, including all firm-level phenomena involving workers, and too narrowly, missing how individual differences in knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) help define the value of the worker to the firm.

The Strategic Management Society attracted 450 participants to its annual conference in October in exotic, bustling Singapore to explore the theme, “Cultures and Competitive Strategies.”

This paper proposes that firms’ positioning in digital markets involves offering combinations of core and peripheral product functions that add value to customers. When new entrants face demand uncertainty and seek positions that match customer needs and preferences, they draw on external market feedback, specifically customer evaluations of other products, as an input to their positioning decisions. Using data on Photo & Video mobile applications in the Apple App Store, we theorize and show that two dimensions of external market feedback—overall customer dissatisfaction and customer evaluation heterogeneity—convey distinct information about the demand environment. These cues shape whether entrants position as generalists combining multiple functions or as specialists that concentrate on a core function, as well as the extent to which they differentiate from existing competitive products. Our results show that higher customer dissatisfaction is associated with greater focus on the core function and stronger differentiation in the peripheral functions. On the other hand, higher customer evaluation heterogeneity is associated with reduced focus on the core function and greater imitation in peripheral functions. This study contributes to the emerging literature on firm strategies in digital markets by identifying external market feedback as a key driver of product variety and positioning. It also advances a demand-side view of market entry by demonstrating how entrants use broad market signals to manage demand uncertainty when choosing their initial positions. Funding: This work was supported by the INSEAD [Research & Development Funds] and the Strategic Management Society [SRF Dissertation Research Grant 2018]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17112 .

New technologies create a dilemma for senior members of occupations. Traditionally, practical expertise and position are considered correlates, yet when new technologies arrive, they may be knocked out of alignment. This means that senior members must develop new expertise lest their position be threatened. However, because position often signifies expertise, developing new practical expertise may be challenging. Indeed, senior members face strong pressures not to appear to nor actually devote time to comprehensive formal training as they are booked with complex problems using prior methods, they are responsible for the learning of junior members, and they have passed early career training windows. Through comparative ethnographic field studies of urological surgery and investment banking, we show that “inverted apprenticeships,” defined as configured struggle and restructured interactions with junior members that allow senior members to develop practical expertise with new technologies while maintaining their position, resolve this dilemma. We identify four pathways that senior experts took to structure these inverted apprenticeships, including seeking, stalling, leveraging, and confronting. We uncover the conditions of each pathway and trace their consequences. Although these pathways allowed senior members to enhance or preserve their position, they generated widely varying practical expertise with the new technology. Furthermore, the majority of these pathways undermined the learning of those most junior, who were supposed to be developing expertise through their interactions with seniors.Funding: This work was supported by the Strategic Management Society [Grant SRF-2015DP-0063] and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant 752-2014-0378].

Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections themselves? We argue that entrepreneurs may be under-networked because they lack the necessary social skills—the ability to communicate effectively and interact collaboratively with new acquaintances—that allow them to match efficiently with knowledgeable peers. We use a field experiment in the context of a business training program in Togo to test if a short social skills training module increases the number and complementarity of peers that participants choose to learn from. We find that social skills training led entrepreneurs to match with 50% more peers and that more of those matches were based on complementary managerial skill. Finally, the training also increased entrepreneurs’ monthly profits by approximately 20%. Further analyses point to improvements in networking and advice as the drivers of performance improvements. Our findings suggest that social skills help entrepreneurs build relationships that create value for both themselves and their peers. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: This work was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation [Dissertation Fellowship] and the Strategic Management Society [SRF Dissertation Fellowship]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4334 .

Research has indicated limited effects of formal governance measures on securities fraud prevention in emerging markets due to the weak rule of law. We propose that hierarchical inconsistency, misaligned rank ordering in formal organizational and informal social hierarchies of the corporate elite, can provide a novel monitoring mechanism to reduce securities fraud. Leaders at the top of the two inconsistent hierarchies can feel distressed and motivated to engage in contestation and challenge each other’s authority, thus providing checks and balances and preventing groupthink. This monitoring effect is likely to be stronger when either of the two heads has dominant and unequivocal superiority in their respective hierarchy, making them particularly distressed by the hierarchical inconsistency and prone to contest. We test our argument in the context of publicly listed family-controlled firms in China, where business and family hierarchies may confer superiority to different individuals. Our study contributes to the corporate securities fraud literature by understanding how formal organizational structures and informal social relationships interact and jointly influence governance effectiveness in emerging markets.Funding: This work was supported by the Strategic Management Society [2015 SRF Dissertation Research Grant], Rudolf and Valeria Maag research funds, and INSEAD alumni funds.

Research Summary This study builds a grounded model of how careers shape entrepreneurs’ preferences for causal and effectual decision logics when starting new ventures. Using both verbal protocol analysis and interviews, we adopt a qualitative research approach to induct career management practices germane to entrepreneurial decision making. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a model conceptualizing how configurations of career management practices, reflecting different emphases on career planning and career investment, are linked to entrepreneurial decision making through the imprint that they leave on one's view of the future, generating a tendency toward predictive and/or creative control. These findings extend effectuation theorizing by reformulating one of its most pervasive assumptions and showing how careers produce distinct pathways to entrepreneurial thinking, even prior to entrepreneurial entry. Managerial Summary Treating your own career as a start‐up impacts how you make decisions when actually becoming an entrepreneur. Based on empirical findings, we explain why and how sets of career management practices are distinctively linked to the use of different logics when making entrepreneurial decisions. Individuals who throughout their careers have emphasized investments in skills and networks over efforts to forecast and plan develop a general view of the future in which creative control dominates predictive control. The opposite is true for those who rely on managing their careers through planning but remain passive in their career investments. Upon entry to entrepreneurship, these differences become relevant such that some entrepreneurs rely on attempts to predict the future while others actively try to create it. © 2016 The Authors. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal published by Strategic Management Society.

With the development of communication technology that makes online transactions easier, there is also an increased risk of disintermediation—sellers and buyers circumventing a platform to transact directly—in online two-sided marketplaces. Such disintermediation may lead to significant revenue loss for online platforms. However, it remains unclear how the characteristics of platforms affect their vulnerability to disintermediation. Using the blockade of Skype in mainland China as a natural experiment, this study examines how online communication technologies affect disintermediation and transaction outcomes in a large U.S. online freelance marketplace. The results show that restricting this alternative communication technology, which platforms struggle to monitor, reduces disintermediation by around 18%. This effect is potentially due to economic frictions in transactions, as the reduction in disintermediation is greater for high-transaction-cost jobs, such as time-sensitive jobs, communication-intensive jobs, and high-skilled jobs, as well as for cost-sensitive users, such as experienced users and personal users as opposed to enterprise users. With these results, platforms can reduce disintermediation risks when making investment and market entry decisions. This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems. Funding: This work was supported by the Strategic Management Society [SRF Dissertation Research Grant]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02736 .