Lorange and Roos produced the first analysis of how alliances need to be managed, and
covered the international perspective. They distinguish between a variety of forms of alliance ranging from loose, collaboration arrangements with suppliers or distribution channels through to fully autonomous, separate joint ventures where the various partners take equity stake in the business.
Lorange and Roos take essentially a competitive perspective on Alliances. They emphasize that the longer term nature and success of a strategic alliance (where parties have a clear, longer term stake in the alliance - of money and management) is relative on the relative bargaining power of each partner. An alternative perspective is the collaborative - when an alliance is a positive sum game between partners.
McTaggart and Co. provide a very practical and relatively easy way of understanding what shareholder value means - in terms of content, process and culture.
Managing for shareholder value is considered by them to be The Governing Objective of corporates. The emphasize the need for detail assessment of potential for value creation through strategic decisions (via the value and cost drivers) They emphasize the importance of external, environmental value drivers much more than any other writers)
Their treatment of management process is particularly useful - including strategic planning budgeting, resource allocation, performance management, and top management corporation.
Mintzberg is a major contributor to the connection between organization structure and strategy. He introduced the concept of organizational forms which very greatly helps in the understanding why different companies have vastly different structures and cultures.
Mintzbergs initial insights came from studying managers at an everyday level. He found that while managers should be reflective thinkers, the reality was that they were frantic doers, lost in the momentum of management actions.
Mintzberg also separated parts of the organization based on the following:
- the strategic apex - top executives
- the technostructure - the advisory staff
- the operating case - the main doers
- the middle line - the supervisory force
- the support staff - R&D, Human resource etc
This helped him to understand how organizational structures change over time to respond to market and company life cycles, and thus adjust to strategic change. His book 'Structures in Fives' is a very comprehensive account of organizational structures.
Mitroff's contribution is in helping managers uncover the mental maps of their strategy. He recognized that strategies often fail because of their dependency on taken for granted assumptions - which turn out not to be met. This called for an explicit process of mapping these assumptions, called the uncertainty importance grid.
In its original form the uncertainty grid appears abstract. A simplified form of understanding them appears below:
- Very important and very uncertain: the danger zone
- Very important and low uncertainty: the complacency zone
- Low importance and very uncertain: the early warning zone
- Low importance and low uncertainty: the trivial zone
Ohmae is known as one of the first management thinkers to define competitive advantage. He did so before Michael Porter. He defined competitive advantage as follows:
Either delivering superior value to your target customers relative to your competitors or delivering equivalent customer value to your target customers relative to your competitors at least cost
This is embodied in the three C's model, for actually thinking through the idea of competitive position. To actually use this in practice we have to research;
- Customer benchmarking of the company (in terms of real value and perceived value added) vis-à-vis its customers
- A more detailed appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses (including its cost base), vis-à-vis its competitors.
