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If strategic planning systems have failed it is because managers have failed to adapt them to the changed contexts of their businesses. Four distinct contexts are identified: Pioneer, Expand, Reorient, and Dominate. These labels are chosen to indicate the primary challenge for the business unit in each of these contexts. The contexts vary in their risk and in the adaptation and/or integration orientation that they demand of the strategic planning system. Four key elements of the strategic planning system: direction of goal setting, time‐spending patterns in planning, the relative importance of the strategic budget, and the linkage between the financial plan and the budgets, are identified. Each can be manipulated to adapt the system to suit the firm′s business context.

Corporate controls are mechanisms that corporations use to ensure that the processes and/or outcomes of their business units meet corporate expectations. Challenges in measurement of corporate controls have led many researchers to operationalize them as part of the more ambiguous corporate effects construct, instead of addressing them separately. The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of “fit” between corporate control mechanisms and business unit strategy in performance of business units.

The authors use ordinary least squares regression analysis on data collected between 2010 and 2012 from surveys from managers of 142 Iranian corporations and 1,822 of their subsidiaries. The authors also use financial and market data collected by an IDRO division and accessed through partnership in a joint project.

The authors found that while the fit between business unit strategy and corporate controls has a significant effect on business unit financial performance, it does not have a similar effect on market performance. The findings demonstrate that when business unit managers perceive that they are subject to a balance of strategic and financial controls with a slightly greater emphasis on strategic controls, then business units have higher financial and market performance, although the difference in financial performance is not significant.

The authors find that the misfit between corporate controls and business strategies in such cases could negatively affect the performance of the business unit. However, this research also contributes to a better understanding of the importance of strategic controls to the successful performance of business units. The findings show that while the fit between controls and strategy is most critical for achieving financial performance in business units that pursue product leadership, strategic controls play a more prominent role than financial controls in achieving higher financial or market share performance for all business units.

The findings of the propositions in this research would discourage corporations with tight financial control from engaging in acquisition of businesses considered to be product leaders in their relative product markets.

Past research focusing on the fit between corporate-level factors and business-level factors and their role on business performance are largely limited to conceptual work. The limited empirical studies completed in the past generally reduce control mechanisms to lack or absence of autonomy. This shortcoming has been mainly due to difficulties in measurement of control mechanisms. The empirical study overcomes these barriers and in doing so, reveals surprising findings related to the effectiveness of different control mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overarching framework to guide the understanding of the allocation and deployment of strategic human capital assets within an organization. Using the concept of medical triage with business units analogous to “patients” and their performance to “symptoms or injuries,” the framework suggests a “steal from the poor” perspective that is counter to conventional organizational decline literature.

This is a conceptual paper proposing that there are five different categories of business unit need for human capital assets: expectant, deceased, immediate, delayed or minimal; all based on the type of environment and holistic performance of the business unit. Based on a business unit’s specific situation, the authors suggest a process model guiding how to conduct a triage analysis to optimize the allocation of strategic human capital assets within an organization.

The authors argue that current trends in assessing strategic human capital assets which make comparisons across organizations are necessary but insufficient (e.g. comparing a store to other stores in its district or region). Each business unit has its own unique internal capabilities and external constraints that also must be accurately assessed to make an informed organizational-level decision about where and how to deploy strategic human capital assets.

Borrowing from medical science, this paper demonstrates a new conceptual framework with propositions for researchers and guidance for practitioners.

The major purpose of this paper is the development of a theoretical framework that can be used by corporate practitioners to understand the implicit parenting strategy of their company, assess its performance, and adjust it for improving the net corporate value creation.

In this paper, a three‐dimensional framework is developed that accounts for corporate‐to‐business and business‐to‐business interactions, value‐adding and value‐destroying activities, and strategic and operational levers. The framework is operationalized by assigning a broad set of individual activities to these levers.

The paper delivers a robust, systematic, and operational framework to assess the net benefits to a given business of being part of a corporate portfolio, and to identify and evaluate implicit parenting strategies in corporate practice. While previous studies mainly focused on broad parenting approaches with low granularity this framework now allows earlier observations to be substantiated, finer distinctions between the applied strategies to be drawn, and the core of superior value added approaches to be investigated.

The introduced framework can be used to analyze the origin and underlying drivers of conglomerate discounts and premia and thus enhance understanding of capital market valuation of multi‐business companies. The developed framework can also be the basis for the derivation of a typology of corporate parenting strategies. In this way, it can support practitioners in portfolio management – which was also the explicit motivation for the development of the original parenting advantage concept.

The outlined framework will facilitate the investigation of structural, strategic, and organizational roots of superior parenting strategies in corporate practice. It may be used to analyze performance differences of multi‐business companies that go beyond the degree of diversification and may finally contribute to solving the puzzle of the conglomerate discount.

Once a build, hold, or harvest strategy has been adopted for a business, how does the corporation ensure its implementation? The answers range from decentralizing strategic planning to tying the compensation system to successful plan implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore: student perceptions of threshold concepts and capabilities in postgraduate business education, and the potential impacts of intensive modes of teaching on student understanding of threshold concepts and development of threshold capabilities.

The student experience of learning was studied in two business units: strategic management, and accounting. The method involved two phases. In the first, students and unit coordinators identified and justified potential threshold concepts and capabilities. In the second, themes were rationalized.

Significantly more so in intensive mode, the opportunity to ask questions was reported by student participants to support their development of the nominated threshold capabilities. This and other factors reported by students to support their learning in intensive mode are consistent with supporting students to traverse the liminal space within the limited time available in intensive mode.

Respondents from future cohorts will address the small participant numbers. Studies in only two units are reported. Studies in other disciplines are presented elsewhere.

The findings will be important to educators using intensive mode teaching in business, and researchers working within the framework.

This is the first study to explore the potential impacts of intensive modes of teaching on student understanding of threshold concepts and development of threshold capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to revise Burgelman’s idea (1991, 1994) that induced strategic processes is necessarily variation-reducing. In doing so, the authors explore whether major change in a firm’s administrative system can be managed in an evolutionary fashion via induced variation-increasing mechanisms. In particular, the authors focus on a multi-business multinational firm in which different administrative systems were experimented simultaneously as a way to determine which of these systems provided the most conducive context for innovation and capability development.

The authors adopted an inductive perspective and developed a single case research project aimed at documenting the process of experimentation and subsequent selection and adoption of a new administrative system by a large multi-business multinational firm.

The paper’s main contribution is the concept of “induced variation”, understood as intra-organizational variation-increasing mechanisms deliberately created at the top level of the organization to trigger an intra-organizational evolutionary process of management innovation. This finding extends and modifies Burgelman’s discussion of induced and autonomous strategic behavior by showing that induced processes need not necessarily be variation-reducing, but may actually be variation-increasing. Additionally, the authors explain how an evolutionary process aimed at learning about the relative merits of alternative administrative systems through in vivo “reflection in action” (Schön, 1983) unfolds in a complex global organization.

While the work provides several insights on the development of an evolutionary process leading to management innovation, its inductive nature limits its external validity and requires the development of further work for such purpose.

The authors explore the roles of regional organizations in creating new corporate capabilities for the MNC.

The authors show how management capabilities developed in the Latin American context were rolled out to other locations.

The authors' findings confirm that major drastic reorganization initiatives can actually be approached using an evolutionary approach.

This paper aims to offer a conceptualization of how and why corporate level strategic change may build on historical differentiation at business unit level.

Methodologically, an historical case study of Nokia Corporation's drastic business model transformation between the years 1987 and 1995 is reported.

The conceptual and historical work results in a process model of business model change, demonstrating how central business units feed strategic alternatives and capabilities to the corporate‐level transformation process.

The results highlight the importance of corporate level “market mechanisms' that allow promising strategic alternatives to emerge and select out inferior options. In this process, a key mechanism is the exchange of executives and cognitive mindsets between business units and corporate headquarters (CHQ).

The reported research offers an original contribution by showing the dynamic interplay of cognitive and organizational change processes, and highlighting the importance of building on existing capabilities and competencies despite the pressure to demonstrate strong turnaround activities.

Historically, South Africa’s apartheid policies had a negative effect on the financial performance of the South African beverage industry. This effect was characterised by the non‐participation of South African companies in the global market and the presence of foreign enterprises in the domestic market. From 1994, South African industries have been increasingly exposed to new opportunities and forces. Globalisation, deregulation, changing manufacturing systems and the entry of foreign competitors in the 1990s exposed the local industry to competitive challenges in the domestic and the global market. This study examined the impact of changing levels of competition on the performance of strategic business units and the mediating role of management accounting in the South African beverage industry. The methodology employed to investigate this relationship comprised both a survey and a case study. The results indicate a positive correlation between the level of competition and the performance of business units. The results furthermore indicate that enterprises can utilise a management accounting system (MAS) as a strategic response to competition. The increased use of MAS will, in turn, improve the performance of an enterprise. Enterprises that do not respond positively to competition will not survive.

Introduces a decision framework for making strategic competitive choices beyond the product‐brand, business unit, or corporate levels of analysis. It adds a fourth dimension: the multi‐organizational strategic competitive unit which is responsible for planning and implementing competitive strategy in the global marketplace. Long‐range competitive success can no longer be achieved by a single company, and in recent years, the relevant competitive unit has shifted from the company to the larger competitive system of companies aligned in strategic collaborations for competitive advantage. For example, no longer is competition between one auto assembler and another, but between Toyota and its Keiretsu programme of global networking and strategic alliances with suppliers and other competitors against Ford and General Motors and their relative commitment to the more narrowly focused corporate competitive unit.