Search results

The purpose of this paper is to integrate resilience, robustness, and resplendence (R 3) with sustainable enterprise excellence (SEE) and social-ecological innovation (SEI) that assist firms to progress toward continuously relevant performance proceeding from continuously responsible strategy, behavior, and other actions.

Sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience, robustness, and resplendence (SEER3) model and the associated means of SEER 3 maturity assessment are introduced to explain the organizational concept.

SEER3 balances the complementary and competing interests of key stakeholder segments, including society and the natural environment and increases the likelihood of superior and sustainable competitive positioning and hence long-term enterprise success that is defined by continuously relevant and responsible governance, strategy, actions, and performance consistent with high-level organizational R3.

This paper adapts the established principles from physics to characterize enterprise R3 to come up with SEE model.

Sustainable Enterprise Excellence (SEE) is defined and developed through integration and expansion of business excellence modeling and sustainability thought. The intent is to enable simple yet reliable enterprise assessment of triple bottom line (TBL) performance and produce actionable enterprise foresight that can enable next best practices and sources of sustainable competitive advantage through innovation.

Key elements of SEE are identified from various business excellence and sustainability reporting sources, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Global Compact 10 Principles, and criteria of the European Quality Award and America's Baldrige National Quality Award. From these a model and key criteria are distilled, maturity scales developed, and a simple means of assessment presented.

A compact model and supporting maturity assessment approach similar in structure to those behind established excellence awards are developed that enable enterprise assessment of progress toward SEE. The resulting assessment is delivered in a highly consumable, combined narrative and graphic format referred to as a SEE NEWS Report.

The assessment approach presented enables both enterprise progress toward Sustainable Enterprise Excellence and enterprise-to-enterprise comparability. Foresight provided by the assessment enables further advancement.

The social and environmental dimensions of SEE imply that enterprises progressing with respect to its model will of necessity contribute positively to the social fabric.

Sustainable Enterprise Excellence as superior TBL performance resulting from integration of ethical, effective and efficient governance with triple top line strategy is developed, together with a means of maturity assessment.

Enterprise sustainability is the capacity to create and maintain social, economic, and environmental benefits. While sustainability connotes survival, excellence is the capacity to thrive across critical performance domains. Enter resilience and robustness. Resilience is enterprise ability to self-renew through innovation, changing and reinventing itself by adapting its responses to political, social, economic and other competitive shocks or challenges. Robustness is enterprise resistance or immunity gained through strategies, policies, partnerships, and practices that maintain or advance competitive position when shocks or challenges arise. Resistance as herein constructed is a composition or blend of revival, striving, surviving and thriving. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness (SEER2) model and assessment regime is proposed. SEER2 integrates excellence and sustainability principles, methodologies, and standards to optimize enterprise performance across the triple bottom line people, planet, and profit domains.

A Springboard to SEER2 model blending simplicity, applicability, and usability by a range of enterprises is introduced. Its enablers include data analytics and intelligence, human ecology, and social-ecological innovation. Springboard technology includes an assessment regime that yields actionable feedback and foresight. These inform next generation strategy, activities and performance that support identification and implementation of best and next best practices and sources of competitive advantage.

The Springboard to SEER2 enterprise self-assessment approach restricts itself to sustainability, excellence, resilience and robustness considerations.

A model integrating SEER2 in relation to strategic resistance is introduced.

The purpose of this paper is to broadly explore the contributions of supply chain proficiency in relation to sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness (SEER2).

A pre-existing SEER2 model, referred to as the Springboard to SEER2, is put under the microscope to determine specific interactions of supply chain proficiency with six key areas of the Springboard: triple top-line strategy and governance; strategy execution via policies, processes and partnerships; financial and marketplace performance and impact; sustainability performance and impact; human ecology and capital performance and impact; and social-ecological and general innovation and continuous improvement performance and impact.

Supply chain proficiency is integral to attainment of SEER2. As such, supply chain proficiency must be thoughtfully and strategically approached, with success critical to enterprise contribution to mitigation or solution of wicked global challenges ranging from climate change, to food insecurity, to societal conflict.

This paper reveals in depth the centrality of supply chain proficiency to SEER2, suggesting that such models as those behind America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award might be enhanced by more deeply considering supply chain contributions to business and performance excellence. Supply chains are at present peripheral to such models, thereby providing essentially isolated views of enterprises in an age where supply chain collaboration is increasingly the norm.

This paper examines the letters to shareholders of Nike, Inc. and Reebok over the period 1990‐1999. Using narrative analysis, the purpose of this paper is to show how strategic intent of these two companies is revealed through their letters to shareholders.

A qualitative narrative analysis incorporating literary genres and strategic narratives and applying them to strategic schools of thought.

Nike uses many narrative styles, suggesting they view events in a variety of ways in their sensemaking. Reebok, on the other hand, used a limited number of narrative styles, suggesting a limited view or interpretation of events.

Future research could include additional documents of the companies, both public and private.

This analysis shows that companies can successfully use polyplotted and flexible narrative styles, whereas the old school of strategy suggested a single, unwavering course.

The contribution of this paper is the use of organizational narrative as epistemology within the study of strategic management.

In this application brief I share a case study assignment I used in my Leadership in Complex Organizations classes to promote creativity in problem solving. I sorted Ph.D. students into two teams and trained them to use creative writing techniques to encode theory into their own cases. A sense of competition emerged. Later, teams swapped cases for analysis and decoding. The approach became known as “reverse case study.” Summative course evaluations revealed four important instructional themes: (1) students were able to apply and learn leadership and organizational theories, (2) students were able to build rapport and create bonds with fellow students, (3) students explored creativity, and (4) students explored the perspective of “the other.”

As more line managers are given primary responsibility for planning there is an urgent need to acquaint them with the spectrum of potent tools and techniques for developing and focusing strategy. This guide evaluates 30 established planning tools in terms of potential benefits and logistical requirements.

This paper aims to look closely at the actuality of project formation to investigate the performance of project shaping – those acts performed by individuals to make that form of “sense” that constitutes a new project, and to propose a framework for mapping the skills of those individuals who are directly involved in shaping projects.

The paper uses a sensemaking approach from illustrative narratives in order to propose a model of how a project outcome is shaped. The analysis is based on thinking that emerged from the Rethinking Project Management Network and other academic communities.

Significant factors in project formation are: the timing of the conversion of work into controlled project form (the control model of projects), the role of factional interests and power structures (tribal power), the alignment of project scope with a need for transformation (transformation and value), the fast production of tangibles such as project mandates that embody the project essentials (enacted reality), and responsiveness to the dynamics of the wider social context (external dynamics – peripety).

It is apparent that the process of project formation, and the shape each project takes, is highly dependent on the actions of key individuals (shapers' volition). There is further scope for expanding the understanding, within the structure of the framework, of the full array of activities performed by individuals in action as “project shapers”.

The framework developed is of immediate value to those individuals who use their skills to mould a project, providing a conceptual basis they can use to learn and extend their skills.

Much of the interest to date in project formation has focused on instrumental managerial practices of governance. This paper focuses on lessons to be learned from the actuality of project formation – the conversion of work in organisations from a muddle of ambiguity and complexity into that particular form of cohesion and accepted “sense” that is a defined project or programme.

Scenarios are plausible stories about alternative futures. They draw on stories, which are most natural and powerful ways of representing, and understanding, sets of events. Scenarios look at the past and present, and offer insights into a future where things are generally uncertain. They are used by many organisations as part of strategic planning and as a way of forecasting what core competencies the organisation needs to develop for survival and competitive advantage. These ideas are applied to current library practice.