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Over the last decade, there has been a substantial rise in the number of knowledge-intensive firms - constituted primarily of professionals. The core assets of these businesses are the people themselves. Handle them badly, and they may defect or stall. Successful managers of knowledge-intensive firms must create meaning among and inspire their employees, to ensure high performance. To achieve this, leaders must understand how to target each employee’s ambitions and challenges to facilitate their personal and professional development. This book examines what sets knowledge-intensive firms apart from other types of organizations, and the resultant organizational and strategic differences in ...
This book provides a thorough examination of a variety of specialties within the broad range of management consulting. A book of such scope and depth could only be written by a large number of experts, each from one of the many specialties related to management consulting. Together, all 27 contributors take the reader through an industry that is currently undergoing significant change. While covering all the major practice areas of consulting, the book also offers new insights into change processes and addresses compelling management issues now facing consulting firms.
The process of founding new enterprises and making them grow and prosper is a far more convoluted undertaking than it was just a few decades ago. This book explores the complexity faced by today s entrepreneurs. Institutional boundaries, evolutionary perspectives and the intricacies of management are the central themes in this study of entrepreneurs and SMEs in a world marked by major transitions. While mainstream research enhances our understanding of the dynamics of the entrepreneurial process, this book progresses the research yet further. It examines another fundamental role of research in entrepreneurship: our understanding of future organizational and managerial forms evolving from the...
This volume is a joint publication in the Research in Management Consulting and Contemporary Trends in Organizational Change and Development series. This dual focus reflects the reality that consulting for organizational change is a special type of management consultation, a complex field of endeavor that requires a broad range of skills and competencies. To be truly effective, change-related consulting requires a unique client-consultant relationship, a special set of consulting skills, an expertise in human and organizational systems, and significant personal qualities. It is in high demand in a world full of change. Yet, we still know relatively little theoretically about this type of con...
It is an old cliché that leading and managing academics is like herding cats. This book challenges this myth and presents a way to deal with the many challenges of academic leadership, from managing departments, research groups and teams to managing tensions between research and teaching. The book is a practical and stimulating guide to different pathways to successful academic leadership, both in personal and organizational terms.
Why is it that some companies turn out to be more successful when doing the opposite of what is prescribed in many of the current books on management and strategy? Interestingly, many of the companies depicted as very successful companies in the standard literature end up not faring well over time - probably because they somehow end up in a dangerous autopilot mode. What this suggests is that the conventional literature cookbook isn’t telling us the whole story. Even if companies have temporarily developed from an ugly duckling to a white swan, the popular recipes for success may be clipping such companies’ wings. Conversely, companies adhering to disruptive business models are seen to b...
This volume is part of an ongoing partnership between the Research in Management Consulting book series and the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR), located in Ecully, France, on the outskirts of Lyon. The socio-economic approach to management (SEAM) provides a pathway to creating more engaged, more responsible and responsive, and more productive organizations. In many respects this volume reflects a culmination of ISEOR’s work, drawing together Henri Savall and Veronique Zardet’s insights and framing them in the context of strategy creation and, just as if not more important, strategy implementation. This volume casts SEAM in the context of strategy development ...
This volume focuses on a relatively neglected area of management consulting, the education of consultants. In today’s business world, we find training programs provided by consultancies, certification programs provided by professional organizations, on-the-job training of consultants with formal or informal supervision, self-taught professionals, and some academic programs and courses. Is that enough? No, better consultants are needed to handle the complexity and changing nature of business. Academe is in the best position to provide the critical thinking preparation necessary. Yet, academic institutions have been slow in embracing this challenge. The role of academia needs to grow in magnitude and in certain directions that educate consultants beyond industry training practices. Chapter authors provide examples of innovative programs, topical approaches for courses, and thoughtful reflections on the role academia can play in preparing better consultants. There are lessons for business schools, consultancies, and aspiring and practicing consultants.
The volume is based on the presentations and discussions from the Fifth European Conference on Management Consulting sponsored by the Management Consulting Division of the Academy of Management, which took place June, 2011 at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The conference theme – Exploring the Professional Identity of Management Consultants – attempted to capture the highly ambiguous social status of this young and emerging profession. Management consulting does not have professional standards or accreditation criteria like those found in medicine or law, there are low barriers to entry, and a broad range of tasks are undertaken in the name of consulting. As a result, a...
The impetus for this work emerged from Savall’s belief that there is a doubleloop interaction between social and economic factors in organizations, between behaviors and structures, and between the quality of life in organizations and their economic performance. When managers underestimate this dynamic interaction, the resulting tension ultimately manifests in lowered performance and increased costs, what he refers to as the “hidden costs” of organizational life. Only by delving into the depths of these organizational dynamics can we hope to fully understand – and create the basis for improving – organizational performance. The Qualimetrics Approach presents a different and challen...