What can explain the longevity gap between a company that survives for centuries--the Swedish company Stora, for example, which is more than 700 years old--and the average corporation, which does not last 20 years? A team at Royal Dutch/Shell Group explored that question. Arie de Geus, a retired Shell executive, writes about the team's findings and describes what he calls living companies-organizations that have beaten the high mortality rate of the average corporation. Many companies die young, de Geus argues, because their policies and practices are based too heavily on the thinking and language of economics. Their managers focus on producing goods and services and forget that the organization is a community of human beings that is in business--any business--to stay alive. In contrast, managers of living companies consider themselves to be stewards of a long-standing enterprise. Their priorities reflect their commitment to the organization's long-term survival in an unpredictable world. Like careful gardeners, they encourage growth and renewal without endangering the plant they are tending. They value profits the same way most people value oxygen: as necessary for life but not the purpose of it. They scuttle assets when necessary to make a dramatic change in the business portfolio. And they constantly search for new ideas. These managers also focus on developing people. They create opportunities for employees to learn from one another. Such organizations are suited for survival in a world in which success depends on the ability to learn, to adapt, and to evolve.
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Abstract How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.
I present evidence consistent with theories that small boards of directors are more effective. Using Tobin's Q as an approximation of market valuation, I find an inverse association between board size and firm value in a sample of 452 large U.S. industrial corporations between 1984 and 1991. The result is robust to numerous controls for company size, industry membership, inside stock ownership, growth opportunities, and alternative corporate governance structures. Companies with small boards also exhibit more favorable values for financial ratios, and provide stronger CEO performance incentives from compensation and the threat of dismissal.
Companies are increasingly asked to provide innovative solutions to deep-seated problems of human misery, even as economic theory instructs managers to focus on maximizing their shareholders' wealth. In this paper, we assess how organization theory and empirical research have thus far responded to this tension over corporate involvement in wider social life. Organizational scholarship has typically sought to reconcile corporate social initiatives with seemingly inhospitable economic logic. Depicting the hold that economics has had on how the relationship between the firm and society is conceived, we examine the consequences for organizational research and theory by appraising both the 30-year quest for an empirical relationship between a corporation's social initiatives and its financial performance, as well as the development of stakeholder theory. We propose an alternative approach, embracing the tension between economic and broader social objectives as a starting point for systematic organizational inquiry. Adopting a pragmatic stance, we introduce a series of research questions whose answers will reveal the descriptive and normative dimensions of organizational responses to misery.
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This paper explores the role of the business model in capturing value from early stage technology. A successful business model creates a heuristic logic that connects technical potential with the realization of economic value. The business model unlocks latent value from a technology, but its logic constrains the subsequent search for new, alternative models for other technologies later on—an implicit cognitive dimension overlooked in most discourse on the topic. We explore the intellectual roots of the concept, offer a working definition and show how the Xerox Corporation arose by employing an effective business model to commercialize a technology rejected by other leading companies of the day. We then show the long shadow that this model cast upon Xerox's later management of selected spin‐off companies from Xerox PARC. Xerox evaluated the technical potential of these spin‐offs through its own business model, while those spin‐offs that became successful did so through evolving business models that came to differ substantially from that of Xerox. The search and learning for an effective business model in failed ventures, by contrast, were quite limited.
The authors conducted a qualitative study of the motivations and contextual factors that induce corporate ecological responsiveness. Analytic induction applied to data collected from 53 firms in the United Kingdom and Japan revealed three motivations: competitiveness, legitimation, and ecological responsibility. These motivations were influenced by three contextual conditions: field cohesion, issue salience, and individual concern. In this article, the authors also identify the conditions that likely lead to high corporate ecological responsiveness.
Although brand theorists suggest that what a person knows about a company (i.e., corporate associations) can influence perceptions of the company's products, little systematic research on these effects exists. The authors examine the effects of two general types of corporate associations on product responses: One focuses on the company's capabilities for producing products, that is, corporate ability (CA) associations, and the other focuses on the company's perceived social responsibility, that is, corporate social responsibility (CSR) associations. The results of three studies, including one that measures respondents’ CA and CSR associations for well-known companies and one that uses consumers recruited in a shopping mall, demonstrate that (1) what consumers know about a company can influence their beliefs about and attitudes toward new products manufactured by that company, (2) CA and CSR associations may have different effects on consumer responses to products, and (3) products of companies with negative associations are not always destined to receive negative responses. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for marketing managers and further research.
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The creators of the revolutionary performance management tool called the Balanced Scorecard introduce a new approach that makes strategy a continuous process owned not just by top management, but by everyone. In The Strategy-Focused Organization, Robert Kaplan and David Norton share the results of ten years of learning and research into more than 200 companies that have implemented the Balanced Scorecard. Drawing from more than twenty in-depth case studies--including Mobil, CIGNA, and AT&T Canada--Kaplan and Norton illustrate how Balanced Scorecard adopters have taken their groundbreaking tool to the next level. These organizations have used the scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the center of key management processes and systems. Kaplan and Norton articulate the five key principles required for building strategy-focused organizations: 1) translate the strategy into operational terms, 2) align the organization to the strategy, 3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, 4) make strategy a continual process, and 5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership. The authors provide a detailed account of how a range of organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors have deployed these principles to achieve breakthrough, sustainable performance improvements.
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Reports the results of a study on the social and environmental disclosure practices of New Zealand companies. In addition to providing an up‐to‐date description of such practices, and placing them in an international context, examines some potential determinants of these practices. Replicates and extends a recent US study (Patten, 1991). Makes improvements on Patten’s study by measuring the amount of disclosure as a continuous variable using both page amount and the number of sentences. The results indicate both measures are highly correlated. Consistent with Patten (1991) and other studies, reports that both company size and industry are significantly associated with social and environmental disclosures, and that profitability (both current and lagged) is not. In addition to these variables, provides some tentative evidence that New Zealand companies with dual (overseas) stock exchange listings are greater disclosers of social and environmental information.
Companies are facing increasing pressure to both maintain profitability and behave in socially responsible ways, yet researchers have provided little information on how corporate social responsibility impacts profitability. This paper reports the findings from in‐depth interviews of consumers to determine their views concerning the social responsibilities of companies. A typology of consumers whose purchasing behavior ranges from unresponsive to highly responsive to corporate social responsibility was developed from the analysis.
This study uses unobtrusive measures of the narcissism of chief executive officers (CEOs)—the prominence of the CEO's photograph in annual reports, the CEO's prominence in press releases, the CEO's use of first-person singular pronouns in interviews, and compensation relative to the second-highest-paid firm executive—to examine the effect of CEO narcissism on a firm's strategy and performance. Results of an empirical study of 111 CEOs in the computer hardware and software industries in 1992–2004 show that narcissism in CEOs is positively related to strategic dynamism and grandiosity, as well as the number and size of acquisitions, and it engenders extreme and fluctuating organizational performance. The results suggest that narcissistic CEOs favor bold actions that attract attention, resulting in big wins or big losses, but that, in these industries, their firms' performance is generally no better or worse than firms with non-narcissistic CEOs.
Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. The Case for Doing at Least Some Good. 2. Corporate Social Initiatives: Six Options for Doing Good. 3. Corporate Cause Promotions: Increasing Awareness and Concern for Social Causes. 4. Cause-Related Marketing: Making Contributions to Causes Based on Product Sales. 5. Corporate Social Marketing: Supporting Behavior Change Campaigns. 6. Corporate Philanthropy: Making a Direct Contribution to a Cause. 7. Community Volunteering: Employees Donating Their Time and Talents. 8. Socially Responsible Business Practices: Discretionary Business Practices and Investments to Support Causes. 9. Twenty-five Best Practices for Doing the Most Good for the Company and the Cause. 10. A Marketing Approach to Winning Corporate Funding and Support for Social Initiatives: Ten Recommendations. Notes. Index.
Using a large database of private firms in Italy, we analyze the determinants of initial public offerings (IPOs) by comparing the ex ante and ex post characteristics of IPOs with those of private firms. The likelihood of an IPO is increasing in the company's size and the industry's market‐to‐book ratio. Companies appear to go public not to finance future investments and growth, but to rebalance their accounts after high investment and growth. IPOs are also followed by lower cost of credit and increased turnover in control.