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This paper aims to highlight dysfunctional multi-stakeholder relations and negative business outcomes, evidenced in lose/lose results, exacerbated by failure to acknowledge strategic business focus as a means to redress problematic business thinking and practice amongst key leadership teams associated with achieving balance between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.

The reframed strategic business focus has been developed using Eastern philosophy and Western organization theory and refers to four case examples of dysfunctional business thinking and practice.

Strategic business focus results from an interdependent and complementary positive mediating relationship between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility, which is moderated by organization culture (organization core values, including shared value) and strategic human resource management (talent and mindset).

Strategic business focus as proposed has not been empirically tested but seeks to address a conceptualization that competing business and stakeholder agendas are interdependent and complementary.

Strategic business focus seeks to redress traditional win/lose and lose/lose business outcomes, by supporting win/win results, represented by shared value amongst multi-stakeholders.

Strategic business focus seeks to provide a means whereby corporate social responsibility, particularly the social contract, plays a key role in the decisions and practices of key leadership teams and the behaviour of corporate staff in host environments when seeking competitive advantage.

Eastern thinking and behaviour are usually undervalued in the western business literature, particularly in western business practice. Joint attention, however, may improve competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility agendas in support of diverse management practices, including shared value.

This monograph reports on the strategic and operational roles of learning and development (L&D) professionals in Irish, UK European and US organisations including multinational corporations, small to medium enterprises, the public sector and not for profit organisations. This paper aims to investigate the contextual factors influencing L&D roles in organisations, the strategic and operational roles that L&D professionals play in organisations, the competencies and career trajectories of L&D professionals, the perceptions of multiple internal stakeholders of the effectiveness of L&D roles and the relationships between context, L&D roles, competencies/expertise and perceived organisational effectiveness.

The study findings are based on the use of multiple methods. The authors gathered data from executives, senior managers, line managers, employee and L&D professionals using multiple methods: a survey (n = 440), Delphi study (n = 125) and semi-structured interviews (n = 30).

The analysis revealed that L&D professionals increasingly respond to a multiplicity of external and internal contextual influences and internal stakeholders perceived the effectiveness of L&D professionals differently with significant gaps in perceptions of what L&D contributes to organisational effectiveness. L&D professionals perform both strategic and operational roles in organisations and they progress through four career levels. Each L&D role and career level requires a distinct and unique set of foundational competencies and L&D expertise. The authors found that different contextual predictors were important in explaining the perceived effectiveness of L&D roles and the importance attached to different foundational competencies and areas of L&D expertise.

This is one of the few studies to have investigated the L&D professional role in organisations from the perspective of multiple stakeholders using multiple research methods.

Issues, which have negatively impacted a diversity of business stakeholders, suggest that business thinking and leadership behaviors surrounding a desired strategic business focus appear increasingly inadequate. For example, that integration strategies and differentiation strategies are mutually exclusive. Three issues appear to contribute to such circumstances.

First, Western strategic business frameworks are largely based on quantitative foci, and remain largely unchallenged. Second, balance between key leadership team agendas and external stakeholder expectations is usually absent. Third, there is minimal connection between what organizational cultures reward, and how human resource management prescriptions provide support.

To address such concerns and implant a renewed strategic business focus, Porter and Kramer (2006, 2011) have identified the notion of shared value, which seems an appealing means to redress business problems represented by negative multistakeholder relations; moreover, an absence of any contemporary acknowledgment of the social contract. Nevertheless, a number of elements appear to be missing from the how shared value is portrayed by Porter and Kramer (2006, 2011).

Based on Maslow’s notion of Eupsychia, and employing an Ideation approach, a renewed strategic business focus supporting the notion of shared value is presented. The renewed focus seeks to enhance Porter and Kramer’s (2011) framework, by including key features to enhance shared value, including elements of Eastern and Western philosophy, and Western organization theory.

Problematic examples, identifying the absence of shared value, and including research propositions are identified.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.

Aims to prove that a firm's perception of the strategic nature of supply depends on how it defines its competitive advantage within the marketplace.

Data were collected using a random stratified cross‐sectional design from 142 large manufacturing firms in the UK. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the hypothesised model.

Firms defining their competitive advantage as being cost‐focused will generally consider supply as playing merely a cost‐reduction role, i.e. passive and supportive, whereas firms viewing their competitive advantage as being differentiated will see supply as strategic, i.e. as a distinctive capability.

This study's single country setting could limit the generalizability of the findings. Replication of the model would require contrasting empirical contexts. Longitudinal as opposed to cross‐sectional data are needed for studying causations. Also future studies should take a multiple‐source as opposed to a single‐source data collection approach. Finally, more empirical research is needed, specifically grounded in the established strategy literature.

The model presented allows managers to understand what strategies to follow and which relationship modes to adopt. This study has a number of implications for strategy makers at the level of the firm and within supply.

Supply management has so far focused on the wrong question. Instead of “why isn't purchasing strategic?”, it should be “what are the firm's strategic goals and priorities?” This refocusing allows exploration of the linkage between the firm's competitive positioning and priorities and that of supply.

This study seeks to examine the impact of owner's knowledge of information technology (IT) on business and IT strategic alignment, as well as on IT use in the small firm context, using the resource‐based view as a theoretical foundation.

A random sample of 217 small manufacturers and financial services firms in the USA answered a two‐page survey containing questions pertaining to the company's business strategies, the extent IT supported each business strategy, types of IT used, and the level of owner's IT knowledge.

Owner's knowledge of IT was found to be a significant predictor of IT strategic alignment, as well as adoption of traditional IT and internet technologies, while controlling for differences in firm attributes (size, age, industry affiliation, and strategic focus).

Small firm owners are well advised to seek ways of improving their knowledge of IT, integrating IT use in firm‐level business planning, as well as reexamining their business strategy and IT use to detect and correct misalignments, if any.

From the resource‐based view, the owner's IT knowledge is a critical resource that cannot be easily codified, hence less susceptible to competitive erosion, since it is embedded in the owner's tacit knowledge and expressed in the unique but complementary use of IT in support of the firm's strategic goals. This study confirmed small firm owner's knowledge of IT as an important, knowledge‐based capability and a vital component of business‐IT strategic alignment.

This paper aims to explore management control in the strategic development of business model and managerial innovations. The issue is approached from the perspective of managerial work, aiming to outline what managers consider as essential elements of management control in these often iterative and learning-intensive developmental activities.

The study is based on the views of 20 managers engaged in strategic development and its control in various organisations. The interview data consist of the respondents’ experiences and project cases involving non-technological innovations. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify three key concepts of management control of business model and managerial innovations.

The findings suggest that with managerial and business model innovation, appropriate management control could be established by aligning the innovation being developed with the strategic story of the organisation, leveraging co-creational projects and experimentation with close customer contact.

The focus of this qualitative research is on building an initial framework. Future research could expand understanding of managerial work and accounting by examining this study’s outcomes in more practical detail in various contexts.

The findings of this study lead managers and researchers to consider management control of non-technological innovations as an enabling system supporting successful innovations.

This study adds a unique perspective to the literature by conceptualising and offering managerial implications for management control in the context of strategic development of non-technological innovations.

The recent growth of interests in applying the Chinese art of warfare to complement the Western style of management process suggested that an integrated business model that combined the Western scientific management and ancient Chinese wisdom could be an effective tool for gaining strategic advantages, especially for companies that want to share the newly opened markets in mainland China. Among all, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been widely adopted and applied in various business areas. However, there are few presentations with strategic models. Moreover, works on his successor, Sun Pin, are limited particularly to the area of applying his art of warfare in gaining strategic advantages and transforming business crisis into opportunities. While various business and quality management models at national level have been established by various countries to emphasise their differences in economic development and culture, models of similar type that make use of the ancient Chinese wisdom are not available either in Hong Kong or in China. As China has become a member of the WTO, a national model that framed both the Chinese management philosophy and Western management wisdom would certainly help in driving local and international enterprises for business competitiveness. This paper is therefore a first attempt to investigate the applicability of Sun Pin’s The Art of Warfare for business management strategies by amalgamating the Western wisdom and the Chinese art of warfare.

A place in the boardroom is often considered a necessary if not sufficient condition for HR directors to exercise strategic influence on business decision‐making. The purpose of the paper is to explore the perceived importance of HR boardroom representation, both in a formal and symbolic sense, and to what extent HR directors can exercise strategic influence without it?

Evidence is explored from a survey of 1,188 UK HR practitioners, including 255 board members, and a series of follow‐up interviews with 16 HR directors.

Analysis of the survey findings suggests that boardroom versus non‐boardroom representation of HR appears to matter in four key areas: board members believe they have greater involvement and influence in business planning processes; they have more positive perceptions of the overall performance of HR; they give higher ratings of CEO perceptions of the HR function; and they believe they achieve greater integration of HR strategy with business strategy.

While there are increasingly other formal mechanisms and forums (e.g. executive committees, personal networks) outside the boardroom for HR directors to exercise their influence, it appears that the “symbolic capital” of boardroom recognition and esteem still retains enormous significance and rhetorical appeal for the HR profession.

The paper seeks to reframe the debates on the relative importance of HR boardroom versus executive committee representation as forums of strategic influence, by focusing on the continued symbolic significance of boardroom representation. It is concluded that a reworking of Bourdieu's concept of “symbolic capital” (i.e. professional esteem, recognition, status, or respect) as board capital may be useful in reframing future research on HR boardroom representation.

Despite the huge amount of studies that have investigated the strategy–performance relationships and knowledge management (KM)–performance relationships, there is little consensus regarding the nature of these connections. By reviewing related literature, some notable limitations and inconsistent results are highlighted in extant studies. To address these challenges, this study aims to explore the effects of strategic orientation and KM mechanisms on business performance.

The study conducted an empirical investigation of 227 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to explore the relationship between strategy−performance and KM−performance. Business strategy is conceptualized as a comparative construct with six dimensions, KM is conceptualized by two types of KM mechanisms of technical and non-technical KM mechanisms and business performance is measured by four dimensions of balanced scorecard (BSC). The cluster analysis was used to explore different aspects of these three constructs.

Using cluster analysis, the results indicate that firms with high level of analysis, defensiveness, futurity and proactiveness in strategic orientation have better performance and also the high level of both KM mechanisms another important finding shows that firms with more KM mechanisms have high performance and technical mechanisms have more predictor role on performance.

This research also has prescriptive implications for strategic managers and KM practitioners. The finding enhanced the understanding of the relationship between strategic orientations, KM and performance. The results assist managers to assess business performance regarding strategic orientations and KM mechanisms of the firms. Therefore, it helps firms to improve strategic resource allocation and exploit KM investment by considering ideal pattern of the performance.

By reviewing strategic management and KM literature, it is revealed that there are little studies about how the interaction of strategic orientation and KM influences business performance. The main contribution of the study is exploring the profile of the firms by considering their strategic orientation and KM mechanisms and their impact on business performance. This study provides an empirical evidence about interaction of strategic orientations, KM mechanisms and business performance in SME context, which is merely investigated in previous researches.