The necessary nature of future firms : attributes of survivors in a changing world

Print version

Dangerous deficiencies

What is happening?

What is not?

The role of top management

About this book

The future environments of business organizations

Scientific knowledge and improved technology

Scientific knowledge

Improved technologies

Mental blocks to imagining a different world on the same planet

Interim summary and transition

The complexity of future environments

Environmental variety

Environmental density and interdependence

Interim summary and transition

Environmental dynamism and competitiveness

Velocity, turbulence, and instability

Environmental competitiveness

Summary and transition

Sensing and interpreting the environment

Facit AB

Importance of environmental sensing and interpretation

Consequences and importance of interpretation

Environmental sensing in future firms

Intelligence gathering

Intelligence gathering as a staff function? as an outsourced function?

Intelligence gathering as specialized accountability

Intelligence gathering as eclectic responsibility

Supporting sensors

Probing the environment

Sensing early responses to the firm's actions and products

Top managers as environmental sensors

Interim summary and transition

Interpreting what is sensed

Declines in quality and timeliness of organizational interpretations

Enhancing interpretation in future firms

Faulty interpretations

Summary and transition

Organizational decision making

Decisions and decision making resource in future firms

Increasing environmental dynamism and its consequences

Increasing environmental complexity and its consequences

Increasing competitiveness and its consequences

Decision maker capabilities: past, present, future

Interim summary and transition

Decision making practices in future firms

Ensuring scope

Ensuring speed

Effects of forthcoming information technologies on decision speed and scope

IT investments focused on analysis

IT investments focused on communication

Interim summary and transition

Tempting practices

Intuitive decision making

Satisficing and analogizing

Firms' responses to personal propensities to use short-cut methods

Summary and transition

Knowledge acquisition: organizational learning

Learning, knowledge, and innovation

Organizational learning: a practice whose time has come

Learning from experience

Highly effective learning experiences: designed experiments

Highly effective learning experiences: natural experiments

Highly effective learning experiences: learning from action probes and operations

Highly effective learning experiences: learning by observing samples of one or fewer

Learning from others-vicarious learning

Absorptive capacity

Importing knowledge in the form of expertise

Enhancing organizational learning by enhancing individual learning

Introducing learning practices

Summary and transition

Leveraging learning through knowledge management

Sematech

The four repositories of organizational knowledge

The need to manage knowledge

Direct, informal knowledge sharing

An example of how motivation can negatively affect direct, informal knowledge sharing

Organizational culture: an achievable solution to the problem of motivation?

Structural approaches for facilitating direct, informal knowledge sharing

Interim summary and transition

Knowledge management systems

Motivational issues in knowledge management systems

Managing motivation in knowledge management systems

Situational influences favoring the use of extrinsic motivators

Long-lived traditions and cultures

Increased use of teams, and of ince