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This paper deals with competence management from a system's perspective. The authors adopt the meta-model for systems, as introduced by Eric Schwarz, and explain the basic systemic categories (components, relations, whole) of the organisation, in terms of competences. The systemic nature and the interdependencies of competence assets, capabilities and core competences are presented. Subsequently, the authors explore the viability of organisations, from the perspective of competences, and building on the characteristics of viable systems as described by Schwarz. They introduce Systemic Competence Management, a way to manage competence assets, capabilities and core competences in support of the viability of the organisation.

A new grouping of the eight schools of thought on business management is introduced. Their advancement is initially assessed with the help of a frame of reference, which is based on the principles inherent in Beer’s viable system model. It is proposed that a high degree of systemic advancement is one of the necessary attributes of any business-management concept that will be proven to be highly applicable to managing a firm’s dynamic business in practice. The first assessment reveals that the systemic advancement of the representative concepts varies a lot as follows. Porter’s chained frameworks (representing 1st Porterian school), Barney’s VRIO framework (2nd resource-based school), Sanchez and Heene’s concepts (3rd competence-based school), von Krogh et al.’s concept (4th knowledge-based school), and Hedlund’s heterarchy (5th organization-based school) are fairly systemic, respectively. Martin’s cascade (6th process-based school) is less systemic. Instead, Hamel’s revolutionary concept (7th dynamism-based school) and Brown and Eisenhardt’s competing on edge strategy (8th evolutionary school) are highly systemic. Thus, some promising ways to advance, in particular, the competence-based school of thought on business management are suggested.

This paper proposes a semi-Beerian frame of reference for designing a business organization as a system with four subsystems and eight modes of thinking and interacting in both offering and resource markets. A systemic organizational competence includes an ability to connect a business unit with its markets. It possesses absorption, attenuation, and amplifier capacities. It guides and re-specifies all technology, embedded knowledge, capabilities, and other resources that together enable a business unit to act in the predefined, emerging, or innovative ways needed for goal attainment. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on Porter's frameworks, resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, and evolution. The findings reveal that various core, distinct, organizational, higher, and lower competences and capabilities play both primary and secondary roles, across the eight schools of thought, within a population of 84 competence-related business-management concepts published between years 1990 and 2002. Most authors do not deal with competitiveness boundary setting and modeling. A new frame of reference points to some viable avenues of producing highly applicable competence-based concepts as four semi-Beerian subsystems (boundaries, models, designs, and actions). Managing a business unit successfully involves eight kinds of explicit and tacit knowledge, situational information, reflections, decisions, models, designs, and interactions. It is proposed that a high degree of systemic advancement is one of the necessary attributes of any competence-based concept that will be proven to be highly applicable in managing a real dynamic business. Thus, competence-based scholars are encouraged to adopt the suggested assumptions, redesign their concepts as one or several semi-Beerian subsystems, and thus advance their school of thought markedly in the future.

The emergence of strengths-based management may be the management innovation of our time. Nearly every organization has been introduced to its precepts – for example, the insight that a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses. But in spite of impressive returns, organizations and managers have almost all stopped short of the breakthroughs that are possible. With micro tools largely in place, the future of strengths management is moving increasingly to the macro-management level, as witnessed in the rapid and far-reaching use of large group methods such as the Appreciative Inquiry Summit and its next generation design-thinking summit. Macro means whole and, by definition, unites many improbable opposites – for example, it embraces top down and bottom up simultaneously. It is a prime time source of organizational generativity. But the rules of macro-management are different than any other kind, most certainly micro-management. A decade of research and successful prototyping with single organizations, regions and cities, extended enterprises, industries, and UN-level world summits reveals five “X” factors – a specific set of mutually reinforcing elements of success and organizational generativity – and provides a clear set of guidelines for when and how you can deploy the “whole system in the room” design summit to bring out the best in system collaboration. By analyzing the performance and impacts of six case studies of the “whole system in the room” Appreciative Inquiry design summit, this chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the opportunities, challenges, and exciting new vistas opening up in this the collaborative age – a time when systemic action and macro-management skill are the primary leverage points for game-changing innovation, scalable solutions, and generative organizing. The chapter concludes with a call for more research into the stages of large group dynamics and advances a metaphor from the leadership literature – the spark, the flame, and the torch – to give imagery to the “positive contagion” and “the concentration effect of strengths” that happens during an Appreciative Inquiry Summit where 100s and sometimes 1000s come together interactively and collaboratively to design the future.