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Organizations increasingly view their internal staff as a source of innovation and change and tend to involve an increasing number of organizational members in strategy work. This inclusion is a form of decentralized strategy and usually takes place in meetings. This chapter explores how meetings can become a planned emergence strategy for unlocking endogenous innovation potential. Data have been gathered from a still ongoing field project in which employees of six public offices such as the police or fire brigade participate. The public offices’ administration is characterized by a traditional division of responsibility, meaning that strategy has so far been the business of only few people at the top of the organization. For the first time in this organization, managers and other specialists at various organizational levels have been invited to partake in the new bottom-up strategy format Think Tank. The goals of the Think Tank are to identify the needs of the employees, to find and show potential, create a subculture and encourage innovation. The Think Tank meetings are attended by highly motivated employees who want to develop further organizational goals. The investigation illustrates that exchange on an equal basis, voluntary participation and mixed teams form the foundation for planned emergence strategy meetings. The interactions within the groups are characterized by participants having a positive attitude and avoiding negatively connoted behavior. In the strategy meetings, the various organizational members are enabled to join forces and contribute to strategic renewal. Strategic renewal is essential in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world. This chapter illustrates how meetings can facilitate strategic renewal through planned emergence.

A popular practice of community‐policing is police attendance at community meetings. Given the prevalence of this co‐productive activity, research needs to understand the potential variation in police‐community interactions occurring in or reported in community meetings. Developing reliable and valid measurement techniques to characterize interactions occurring at police‐community meetings has strategic planning value for police and community practitioners and scholarly theoretical value. Two observational coding (issue‐specific and global) and sampling (continuous and periodic) strategies are contrasted. Methodological trade‐offs regarding validity, utility, strategic planning value, and theory‐testing value of the different methods are detailed. It is concluded that global measures of police‐community interactions and periodic observations of police‐community meetings can help with understanding variation in police‐community meetings and implementation effectiveness of co‐productive strategies. Yet, to validly understand the cause and effects of police‐community co‐production on building community and public safety, issue‐specific coding strategies and continuous observations of community meetings are necessary.

After completing the case, students will be able to understand the reasons for the lack of successful strategy implementation in companies, especially engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and general contractors in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemical industry; understand the importance of alignment as an organization capital in successful strategy implementation and familiarize themselves with assessing the alignment readiness of companies; understand the importance of leadership as an organization capital in successful strategy implementation, comprehend one of the most essential theories of leadership in the world of management and familiarize themselves with assessing leadership readiness using this theory; and understand the importance of leadership as an organization capital in successful strategy implementation, comprehend one of the most essential models of organizational culture in the world of management and understand how to assess the readiness of organizational culture in companies.

This case discusses the reasons for strategy implementation failure at PetroSahand International Group, one of the most prominent EPC and general contractors in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry in Iran. This case also examines organization capitals such as alignment, leadership and organizational culture, the three most important factors for the successful implementation of strategies, at this company. PetroSahand is an international, project-oriented company that has been able to successfully complete more than 100 large domestic and international projects during its four decades of activity. However, the company is currently facing many difficulties such as overdue debts and projects.

The target audience of this case are graduates and undergraduates in the courses of Strategic Planning, Strategic Management, Strategy Implementation, Strategy in Action and Change Management. Additionally, this case study can be useful for senior managers of companies and can help in the successful implementation of strategies as well as improving their company’s alignment, leadership and organizational culture.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

This research explores perceptions of knowledge management processes held by managers and employees in a service industry. To date, empirical research on knowledge management in the service industry is sparse. This research seeks to examine absorptive capacity and its four capabilities of acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation and their impact on effective knowledge management. All of these capabilities are strategies that enable external knowledge to be recognized, imported and integrated into, and further developed within the organization effectively. The research tests the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through analysis of quantitative data (n = 549) drawn from managers and employees in 35 residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. Responses were analysed using Partial Least Square-based Structural Equation Modelling. Additional analysis was conducted to assess if the job role (of manager or employee) and three industry context variables of profit motive, size of business and length of time the organization has been in business, impacted on the hypothesized relationships.

Structural model analysis examines the relationships between variables as hypothesized in the research framework. Analysis found that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities correlated significantly with effective knowledge management, with absorptive capacity explaining 56% of the total variability for effective knowledge management. Findings from this research also show that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities provide a useful framework for examining knowledge management in the service industry. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perceptions held between managers and employees, nor between respondents in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Furthermore, the size of the organization and length of time the organization has been in business did not impact on absorptive capacity, the four capabilities and effective knowledge management.

The research considers implications for business in light of these findings. The role of managers in providing leadership across the knowledge management process was confirmed, as well as the importance of guiding routines and knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Further, the results indicate that within the participating organizations there are discernible differences in the way that some organizations manage their knowledge, compared to others. To achieve effective knowledge management, managers need to provide a supportive workplace culture, facilitate strong employee relationships, encourage employees to seek out new knowledge, continually engage in two-way communication with employees and provide up-to-date policies and procedures that guide employees in doing their work. The implementation of knowledge management strategies has also been shown in this research to enhance the delivery and quality of residential aged care.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.

Over the last several years, many corporate boards have sought a more substantial role for directors in the strategy‐setting process. The author suggests a proven system for educating board members about company strategy and gaining a more valuable contribution from them.

The author offers a five‐point process for effectively engaging a board of directors on strategy that he developed working together with corporate leaders.

When the CEO thinks through this process and engages the directors, the board and the CEO can enter into a dialogue that leads to collaboration and a greater chance of achieving the goals of the organization.

The author has implemented this five‐step process with a number of boards of directors.

A key beginning point is for the CEO to work out, in collaboration with the chairman and other directors, a year‐long agenda of strategy topics for board meetings.

The five‐step process enables the boards, chairmen, CEOs, and top managers to begin to forge an effective process to engage directors on strategy that will grow stronger over time.

By adopting relational practice theory on a case study of a Finnish software company, a solution provider for the public healthcare sector, this study examines how the nexus of practices, and their socio-historical premises, enable and constrain intentional strategizing in an organization about to survive the ten-year Death Valley phase. The strategy literature adopting a practice lens has been focused on the rationality of human actions or implicated that all practices are shaped by the historical socio-cultural background of the organization. As a consequence, the practice-based strategy literature tends to overemphasize the rationality of human action or reduces human agency to an extent where the autonomy of actors becomes problematized. These practice-based strategy views circumscribe relational agency as inherent in practice theory treating human agents as acting within a nexus of practices but also consider them as being free to make choices. Findings suggest that even during intentional strategizing, managers are not fully autonomous in their choices as practices constrain possibilities and set boundaries for strategic activities. Prior commitments determine the possible strategic themes to pursue. Within the boundaries of these strategic themes, strategic activities emerge where the strategic activities are shaped by a nexus of practices within and around the organizational boundaries. Depending on the complexity of mutually dependent entertwined strategic activities, they can be perceived as being beyond management control, or considered strategically irrelevant, which influences the strategic direction in the face of uncertainty.

The purpose of this study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, the authors consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The authors then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Their proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings as well and serves as a useful tool for managers seeking to use and evaluate the effectiveness of meetings within their organizations.

This study employs an inductive methodology using discourse analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions to develop a taxonomy of meeting purpose. The authors discourse analysis utilizes open-ended survey responses from a sample of working adults (n = 491).

The authors categorical analysis of open-ended questions resulted in a 16-category taxonomy of meeting purpose. The two most prevalent meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to discuss ongoing projects” at 11.6 per cent and “to routinely discuss the state of the business” at 10.8 per cent. The two least common meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to brainstorm for ideas or solutions” at 3.3 per cent and “to discuss productivity and efficiencies” at 3.7 per cent. The taxonomy was analyzed across organizational type and employee job level to identify differences between those important organizational and employee characteristics.

The data suggested that meetings were institutionalized in organizations, making them useful at identifying differences between organizations as well as differences in employees in terms of scope of responsibility. Researchers and managers should consider the purposes for which they call meetings and how that manifests their overarching organizational focus, structure and goals.

This is the first study to overtly attempt to categorize the various purposes for which meetings are held. Further, this study develops a taxonomy of meeting purposes that will prove useful for investigating the different types of meeting purposes in a broad range of organizational types and structures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an organisation‐wide restructuring exercise by investigating the effectiveness of strategy development and deployment processes in a National Health Service (NHS) Community Health Services (CHS) organisation.

The authors used an embedded single‐case study approach to gather and analyse rich data in order to understand how an organisation can develop and deploy its strategy, and to appreciate the key tools, techniques and issues related to this process. A range of data collection methods, including archival records, interviews, observations and questionnaires, was employed to permit triangulation of the results.

The research led to an understanding of how the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and the Closed‐Loop Management System (CLMS) can be adapted to support the local CHS. In total, 17 key areas for success are presented and used to assess the current capability within the case study organisation.

The authors’ investigation examined the potential for improved strategic development and deployment through the adaptation of the BSC and a CLMS within a NHS CHS organisation.

A six‐step conceptual model is presented which can be used to guide organisations. The model permits the assessment of capability in order to highlight current strengths and weaknesses.

As a suitably skilled workforce is required for the successful implementation of any management system, the research expanded the scope of the study by including an assessment of the organisation's readiness for adapting formal strategy deployment systems.