Strategic Thinking Innovation: Corporate Development Strategies in the Era of Change

Author: David
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The basic principle of this book is to propose a critical and radical thinking in the field of strategy and change research. The purpose is to demonstrate that the understanding of organizational members towards the organization and its strategy, change, and other matters determines the relationship between strategy and change. This provides a foundation for the book to focus on core issues such as concepts, subjectivity, and self-reflection. It should be noted that in today's rapidly changing world, the hope of managing strategy and change may be a fantasy. However, the book presents a challenging and fundamentally satisfactory perspective on complex and turbulent environments, freeing managers from rationalist methodologies and providing them with a new set of approaches. The book will argue these issues in three parts.
Part 1: Related Issues in the Field of Strategy and Change. Books on management and strategy seem to be a trend in the 21st century, and modern management models directly extract many elements from Cartesian-Newtonian ideas. These logic and thought processes are based on "either this or that," making them very fragile. This model includes epistemological and scientific methods, and on this basis, it establishes a "rational knowledge structure." This forms a belief system that managers adhere to. The book finds that research on organizational culture comes from various perspectives. The book starts from a realist perspective. For most realists, culture is an organizational function and a subsystem of the organization. The characteristics of this perspective are that it believes the organization can implement cultural change management.
Part 2: New Methods of Change and Empowerment. The book explores the core dynamics of change management. It is well-known that explaining this issue is very difficult, at least many managers are unwilling to empower. However, it is worth discussing that managers should first understand how empowerment works before participating in and managing organizational change. The book discusses the contributions of complexity theory to change management. The purpose is to propose key principles in complexity theory and connect them with logic and language, thereby using metaphors, contradictions, and dialogue to manage them. This discussion is related to the role of power within and between organizations, which the book will discuss in Chapter 4. It explores the rich and effective methods provided by complexity theory, grounded in critical theory and postmodernism, for change management and organizational development.
Part 3: Connecting Change with Current Themes. The discussion on complexity leads to reflections on change and organizational design. The book explores the importance of organizational design. The concept of organizational knowledge creators has evolved, and now organizational design has shifted from task-oriented to process-oriented. In such an environment, the management decision-making process becomes more subjective; organizational design must ensure that the decisions made by organizational members are the best and can be implemented in the current context.
Part 4: How Did It All Happen? A key feature of modernist understanding of change management is that decision-makers can have multiple strategic choices and can adopt different ways to implement change. By describing these change methods, the book proposes a new understanding of change methods. The book raises a question: Is there a change method without a plan? Or are all change methods a form of "strategic plan"? The book then proposes that subtle adjustments should be made when implementing strategic and change plans, and these adjustments can be achieved through organizational self-reflection. The book discusses various types of behavioral research but places more emphasis on the scientific and systematic questioning process that encourages self-reflection. Since behavioral learning and behavioral research share some similar methodologies, the relationship between the two has not been given more attention.