Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper juxtaposes well-known and all pervasive challenges facing the management of multinational business enterprises today and the solutions developed by Genghis Khan to meet analogous challenges 700 years ago. Genghis Khan together with his children and grandchildren conquered and controlled much of the known world. What lessons does Genghis Khan offer to multinationals? The answer is found in the scope of the actions undertaken to meet the challenges facing the creation and sustainability of the Mongolian Empire. The challenges ranged from issues of communication and coordination to the issues of leadership. With continuous adaptation, Genghis Khan found innovative solutions to these challenges through the design of his organizations and the processes for the management of his Empire.

To survive, firms must acquire innovation-relevant knowledge from their environment. In spite of the importance of knowledge acquisition to the firm, the organization design field is without either an elaboration of the multiple processes through which firms acquire such knowledge or a field-research grounded set of design guidelines concerning organizational practices likely to result in timely and reliable knowledge acquisition. This chapter describes in detail six processes firms commonly use to acquire technical knowledge and, drawing on literatures in technology management, knowledge management, and human resources management, it further describes field-research based practices that enable firms to make these processes effective. The chapter content contributes to the literatures on organization design, organizational learning, and absorptive capacity.

Theories of organizational design provide limited guidance in the ongoing adjustment to web technologies. There is also a gap between the rather sophisticated theories of change that analyze how and why change occurs and the practice-oriented focus of the implementation and guidance of actual change processes. This chapter attempts to close this gap by illustrating how recent developments in change theory may be useful in understanding the actual adoption and implementation of emergent Internet technologies. Empirically, the paper draws on two surveys of Internet-technology adoption by Nordic banks and manufacturers. The theoretical point of departure is Van de Ven and Poole’s (1995) identification of four basic types of change processes: life cycle, teleological, dialectical, and evolutionary change. These theories all encapsulate planned organizational change in that they can explain actual processes and outcomes, including how organizational change emerges and develop in adapting to Internet technology based on characteristics of organizations at different stages of Internet adoption. They may also help to explain the apparently small impact of participation. In a practical perspective, they can enrich the perceptions of participants in actual projects. On this basis we argue for more comprehensive diagnostic models of organizational change.

This study advances an attention-based view of corporate strategy and explores its implications for organizational design. We examine the governance of resource allocation in a multi-business organization through the firm’s network of decision-making and communication channels. Using both primary and secondary sources, we analyze the changes in the decision-making channels at General Electric (GE) over a 51-year period across four CEO regimes: Ralph J. Cordiner, Fred J. Borch, Reginald H. Jones and John F. Welch. We identify four distinct channel functions: reporting, staff, control and agenda management. Through our analysis, we find that strategy does not emerge from any unitary, bounded process but from the pattern that emerges from a network of tightly and loosely coupled channels operating simultaneously.