As the world is currently in the midst of financial and economic crises, this collection of expert contributions focuses on strategy formation and implementation at various organizational levels to address the challenges ahead. The latest economic turmoil and its ongoing impact on business performance are compelling top managers to develop effective business strategies and redefine the boundaries of their operational and strategic activities. On one hand, tremendous challenges in the competitive business environment have become a source of global threats for many small entrepreneurs. On the other, investors faced with today’s volatile economic conditions demand more gains on their capital investments to counter-balance the growing risk of global threats. This book explores the question as to whether it is possible to efficiently and effectively address these threats and obstacles. Are managers capable of planning and implementing strategic actions? What should the major managerial strategy be in order to overcome fluctuations in a market-oriented society? The strategies and practices recommended here are aimed to design continuous development competencies and contribute to the stability, recovery and sustainability of global business operations under volatile economic conditions. This refreshingly novel book seeks to establish managerial strategies and practices for effectively responding to challenges in the competitive business environment, as global volatility and fluctuations continue to worsen.

Michael Gibbert presents a thoughtful theoretical framework allowing readers to critically think about imaginations related to strategy making. His research is based on a highly complex case and diversified context allowing us to understand the use of different theories in an integrated way. Gilbert Probst, World Economic Forum, Geneva, Switzerland Putting imagination center stage in strategy making is a long overdue perspective, one that can renew the field. Michael Gibbert makes an important contribution through this integrative framing. Yves Doz, INSEAD, France If you can t imagine the future of your company, how are you supposed to shape it? This book helps appreciate and execute imaginative strategy making. Martin Hoegl, WHU Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management, Germany Which strategy making approach works best in a crisis? In current literature, the recommendations oscillate between prediction, control, and practice, but this unique book focuses specifically on strategy making in a crisis. In a crisis, the business landscape is neither stable nor predictable, resources are scarce rather than abundant, customers disappear and shareholders revolt, all of which can make prediction and control very difficult. Drawing on evidence from philosophy, and on a multi-year case study of a major multinational, Michael Gibbert points to three different kinds of imaginations and proposes a three-step model for imaginative strategy making. Introducing new topics on this subject, Strategy Making in a Crisis will strongly appeal to top-level managers, including corporate development departments, and business-unit level strategy. Postgraduate students will also receive ideas for their own theses, not only from the content, but also from the approach which is deductive and integrates management theories using social science literature and methodology.

Crisis Management Strategy, first published in 1993, is an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of crisis management in modern enterprises. Simon Booth examines the conventional approaches followed by many firms in the face of change and crisis. He warns of the dangers of theories which oversimplify the causes of crisis and their possible solutions, and which overlook the individual nature of each firm and its environment. Instead, a dynamic new vision of crisis management is offered, which takes into account different kinds of crisis demanding diverse solutions. The key role of leadership is also evaluated in relation to both internally and externally generated crises. Drawing on case studies of leading firms facing crisis solutions in a variety of environments, this truly international volume will provide valuable insight into the experience of crisis, risk and uncertainty. This title will be of interest to students of business.

Offering a strategic orientation to crisis management, this fully updated edition of Crisis Management: Leading in the New Strategy Landscape, Second Edition by William "Rick" Crandall, John A. Parnell, and John E. Spillan helps readers understand the importance of planning for crises within the wider framework of an organization's regular strategic management process. This strikingly engaging and easy-to-follow text focuses on a four-stage crisis management framework: 1) Landscape Survey: identifying potential crisis vulnerabilities, 2) Strategic Planning: organizing the crisis management team and writing the plan, 3) Crisis Management: addressing the crisis when it occurs, and 4) Organizational Learning: applying lessons from crises so they will be prevented or mitigated in the future.

Today's managers, business owners, and public relations practitioners grapple daily with a fundamental question about contemporary crisis management: to what extent is it possible to control events and stakeholder responses to them, in order to contain escalating crises or safeguard an organization's reputation? The authors meet the question head-on, departing from other crisis management texts, and arguing that a complexity-based approach is superior to the standard simplification model of organizational learning.

This book studies the variety of organizational strategies selected to cope with critical uncertainties during crises. This research formulates and applies an institutional sense-making model to explain the selection of strategies for coping with uncertainties during crises to answer the question why some organizations select a rule-based strategy to cope with uncertainties, whereas others pursue a more ad hoc-based strategy. It finds that the level of institutionalization does not affect strategy selection in the initial phase of responding to crises; that three rigidity effects can be identified in the selection of sense-making strategies once organizations have faced the failure of their selected strategies; that discontinuities in the feedback loop of sense-making do not necessarily move organizations to switch their sense-making strategies, but interact with institutionalization to contribute to switching sense-making strategies. This book bridges the gap between institutional thinking and crisis management theorizing. A major step forward in the world of crisis management studies! ——Professor Arjen Boin, Leiden University, the Netherlands In a world of increasingly complex, sociotechnical systems interacting in high-risk environments, Professor Lu’s analysis of how organizations manage uncertainty is both timely and profound. ——Professor Louise K. Comfort, Director, Center for Disaster Management, University of Pittsburgh, USA Prof. Lu greatly enhances our understanding of how organizations cope with uncertainty and make sense of their challenges under the pressures of catastrophe. ——Dr. Arnold M. Howitt, Faculty Co-Director, Program on Crisis Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School, USA This book provides not only a theory of crisis management but also a key concept around which research and practice can be conducted. ——Professor Naim Kapucu, Director of School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, USA A generic institutional model for analyzing and managing hazards, disasters and crises worldwide. ——Professor Joop Koppenjan, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands This book has done an excellent job in opening the black box of how organizations make sense of the crisis situations they face and develop strategies to respond. It should be read by all of us who wish for a peaceful and safe world. ——Professor Lan Xue, Dean of School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China

Crisis management is often viewed as a short-term response to a specific event. While that is a part of the crisis management process, Crisis Management in the New Strategy Landscape takes a long term approach and offers a strategic orientation to crisis management. The text follows a four stage crisis management framework: Landscape survey (anticipating crisis events), strategic planning (setting up the crisis management team and plan), crisis management (addressing the crisis when it occurs), and organizational learning (applying lessons from crisis so they will be prevented, or at least mitigated in the future). Features & Benefits - Strategic approach used throughout the text - New trends in crisis management - Material on business ethics - What to do after the crisis - Case studies and vignettes at the beginning and end of each chapter

The COVID-19 pandemic changed world dynamics, working scenarios, as well as professional and emotional dimensions. The virus has emerged as a significant threat for the continuity of business. Keeping the gravity of the problem in mind, companies must understand the need for change and must now update their strategy to account for pandemics. The next pandemic may be more severe than the current one, meaning that organizations need to devise mechanisms and business models to fight with these situations and maintain business continuity. They should not only look forward to saving plants, machinery and infrastructure, but also concentrate on employee welfare, customer engagement and satisfaction during this crisis time. The book will not only present the evidence of various effective solutions to run a business in the time of a pandemic, but also put forward the new models and practices of business being followed by people at the time of crisis. It aims to create a bridge between existing business models and proposed business solutions, focusing on existing theories and most importantly case studies from recent happenings. This rich collection of chapters will provide insights regarding the business challenges, opportunities and practices during pandemic situations like COVID-19, making it particularly valuable to researchers, academics and students in the fields of strategic management, leadership and disaster management.

What creates corporate reputations and how should organizations respond? Corporate reputation is a growing research field in disciplines as diverse as communication, management, marketing, industrial and organizational psychology, and sociology. As a formal area of academic study, it is relatively young with roots in the 1980s and the emergence of specialized reputation rankings for industries, products/services, and performance dimensions and for regions. Such rankings resulted in competition between organizations and the alignment of organizational activities to qualify and improve standings in the rankings. In addition, today’s changing stakeholder expectations, the growth of advocacy, demand for more disclosures and greater transparency, and globalized, mediatized environments create new challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities for organizations. Successfully engaging, dealing with, and working through reputational challenges requires an understanding of options and tools for organizational decision-making and stakeholder engagement. For the first time, the vast and important field of corporate reputation is explored in the format of an encyclopedic reference. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Corporate Reputation comprehensively overviews concepts and techniques for identifying, building, measuring, monitoring, evaluating, maintaining, valuing, living up to and/or changing corporate reputations. Key features include: 300 signed entries are organized in A-to-Z fashion in 2 volumes available in a choice of electronic or print formats Entries conclude with Cross-References and Further Readings to guide students to in-depth resources. Although organized A-to-Z, a thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter groups related entries by broad areas A Chronology provides historical perspective on the development of corporate reputation as a discrete field of study. A Resource Guide in the back matter lists classic books, key journals, associations, websites, and selected degree programs of relevance to corporate reputation. A General Bibliography will be accompanied by visual maps noting the relationships between the various disciplines touching upon corporate reputation studies. The work concludes with a comprehensive Index, which—in the electronic version—combines with the Reader’s Guide and Cross-References to provide thorough search-and-browse capabilities

In times of crisis, leaders are faced with deep uncertainty and effective crisis management requires strategic decisions to ensure long-term sustainability. There are opposing academic views on the types of cognition and philosophies used in crisis decision-making, thus raising a need for empirical evidence. Coupled with this, increasing turbulence in the business environment has created a renewed interest in research on management decision-making in uncertainty. The novel coronavirus pandemic represents an unprecedented challenge which has accelerated these research agendas. This study explores how business leaders in the banking sector respond to crisis and uncertainty in their organisational strategic decision-making process. Using a qualitative approach, twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with business leaders. This study found that crisis and uncertainty created opposing forces for decision makers which led to a combination of intuition and analysis being applied, shifts in strategy were identified and a three-stage approach was applied in decision-making using a pragmatic philosophy. This study contributes to literature by providing an in-depth understanding of the strategic decision-making process used by business leaders in banking during the coronavirus crisis, revisiting the roles of intuition and analysis in decision-making and proposing a framework which could lead to effective and sustainable strategicdecision making.