Joseph L. Bower and Clark G. Gilbert have collected together some of the leading experts on strategy to examine how strategy is actually made by company managers across the several levels of an organization. Is strategy a coherent plan conceived at the top by a visionary leader, or is it formed by a series of smaller decisions, not always reflecting what top management has in mind? Often it is by examining how options for using resources are developed and selected, that we can see how a company's competitive position gets shaped. On the basis of this understanding, we can see better how these processes can be managed. The book's five sections examine how the resource allocation process works, how the way it works can lead a company into serious problems, how top management can intervene to fix these problem, and where the most recent thinking on these problems is headed. A fifth section contains assessments of this work by thought leaders in the fields of economics, competitive strategy, organizational behavior, and strategic management. The implications for those who study firms are considerable. Activity that is normally thought about in terms of substantive outcomes such as market share and revenue growth, or present value and internal rate of return, is seen to be inextricably related to organizational and administrative questions. The findings presented here should inform the research of economists, strategists, and behavioral scientists. Thoughtful executives and those who consult with them will also find the book provocative. The processes described are complex, but clear enough so that the way toward effective management is apparent. The models developed provide a basis for building the systems and organization necessary for today's competitive world.

Bower and Clark G.

There is a growing tendency to organize various aspects of business life by projects, and to set up temporary organizations in a competition where speed and adaptability becomes a major necessity. Organizing by projects is perceived as a good way to ensure action and to stress the importance of getting work done. However, there is a need to balance the stress on action so that learning capabilities are not only retained, but augmented. Projects as Arenas for Renewal and Learning Processes provides examples of how different types of projects function from a learning or renewal perspective, taken from a wide variety of real-life environments in industrial and public organizations. This book illustrates the mistaken habit of assuming too much in the project area: for example, project notions are, in fact, culture-dependent; classical market-oriented contracting business relations do not fit with the learning dimension of projects; and long-term learning on core competencies and product development projects need to be connected. The book is also intended to represent many of the research frontiers in the project field. Enhancing learning capabilities is - or should be - of a mutual concern to researchers and managers alike.

The book is devoted to structural issues, algorithms, and applications of resource allocation problems in project management. Special emphasis is given to a unifying framework within which a large variety of project scheduling problems can be treated. Those problems involve general temporal constraints among project activities, different types of scarce resources, and a broad class of regular and nonregular objective functions ranging from time-based and financial to resource levelling functions. The diversity of the models proposed allows for covering many features arising in scheduling applications beyond the field of project management such as short-term production planning in the manufacturing or process industries.

Real-Time Management of Resource Allocation Systems focuses on the problem of managing the resource allocation taking place within the operational context of many contemporary technological applications, including flexibly automated production systems, automated railway and/or monorail transportation systems, electronic workflow management systems, and business transaction supporting systems. A distinct trait of all these applications is that they limit the role of the human element to remote high-level supervision, while placing the burden of the real-time monitoring and coordination of the ongoing activity upon a computerized control system. Hence, any applicable control paradigm must address not only the issues of throughput maximization, work-in-process inventory reduction, and delay and cost minimization, that have been the typical concerns for past studies on resource allocation, but it must also guarantee the operational correctness and the behavioral consistency of the underlying automated system. The resulting problem is rather novel for the developers of these systems, since, in the past, many of its facets were left to the jurisdiction of the present human intelligence. It is also complex, due to the high levels of choice – otherwise known as flexibility – inherent in the operation of these environments.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

In the public sector at the moment resources are scarce - or at the very least finite and limited - how they are allocated is therefore of crucial importance. This book analyses this process and examines the competing values that underlie the public service ethic, including the role of markets and quasi-markets, in the delivery of public services. Topics discussed include: * whether people should be denied the public services they need because public bodies are short of money * what balance we should strike between markets and public organisations to provide public services * whether the use of markets has gone too far and whether we need to return to a public service ethic