Strategic Thinking Innovation - Corporate Development Strategy in the Era of Change

Author: (English) David et al
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The fundamental principle of this book is to propose a critical and radical thinking approach in the field of strategy and change research. The purpose is to demonstrate that the understanding of organizational members regarding the organization and its strategies, changes, and other matters determines the relationship between strategy and change. This provides a foundation for the book to focus on core issues such as ideology, 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 yet fundamentally satisfactory perspective for 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 in vogue in the 21st century, and modern management models directly borrow 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 has formed a belief system that managers adhere to. The book finds that research on organizational culture comes from various perspectives. The book begins with 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 Approaches to 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, what is worth discussing is 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 of complexity theory and link them to logic and language, 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 have multiple strategic choices and can adopt different approaches to change. By describing these change methods, the book proposes a new understanding of change methods. The book raises a question: Is there a change plan without a plan? Or are all change methods some form of "strategic plan"? Then, the book 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 inquiry process that encourages self-reflection. Since some research methods of behavioral learning and behavioral research are the same, the relationship between the two has not been given more attention.