Publications

2020
Book

Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

By: Michael Beer

Is Silence Killing Your Strategy?
In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior... View Details

Keywords: Honesty; Communication; Organizational Culture; Trust; Strategy; Performance Effectiveness

Article

How to Develop an Organization Capable of Sustained High Performance: Embrace the Drive for Results-Capability Development Paradox

By: Michael Beer

2001
Working Paper

How to Develop and Organization Capable of Sustained High Performance: Embrace the Drive for Results-Capability Development Paradox

By: Michael Beer

winter 1996
Article

Southwest Airlines: A Case Study Linking Employee Needs Satisfaction and Organizational Capabilities to Competitive Advantage

2020
Working Paper

Strategic Foresight as Dynamic Capability: A New Lens on Knightian Uncertainty

By: J. Peter Scoblic

This paper proposes to treat strategic foresight as a dynamic capability, providing a new theoretical lens on managerial judgment. Formulating strategy under uncertainty is a central challenge facing the modern firm. Analogy is thought to help managers make sense of... View Details

Keywords: Foresight; Dynamic Capabilities; Managerial Judgment; Risk and Uncertainty; Management; Strategy

October 2017
Article

Elevating Repositioning Costs: Strategy Dynamics and Competitive Interactions

By: Anoop R. Menon and Dennis Yao

This paper proposes an approach for modeling competitive interactions that incorporates the costs to firms of changing strategy. The costs associated with strategy modifications, which we term “repositioning costs,” are particularly relevant to competitive interactions... View Details

Keywords: ＂Repositioning Costs; Strategy Dynamics; Strategic Interaction; Capabilities; Cost; Strategy; Change; Game Theory; Organizational Change and Adaptation

Article

The Translucent Hand of Managed Ecosystems: Engaging Communities for Value Creation and Capture

By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman

Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation—governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While these research areas include substantial empirical and theoretical work... View Details

Keywords: Ecosystems; Platforms; Open And User Innovation Strategy; Capabilities; Governance; Innovation Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Value Creation

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2016
Working Paper

Innovation Adoption and Organizational Identity: Identity Dynamism as a Strategic Resource for Top Management Team Decision Making

By: Ryan Raffaelli, Mary Ann Glynn and Michael Tushman

Organizations continuously face decisions about whether to adopt radical innovations. We examine the relationship between innovation adoption and identity, linking identity with firm strategy to explain innovation adoption over time. We conceptualize identity as... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Managerial Capabilities; Organizational Identity; Innovation Adoption; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Innovation and Invention; Adoption

August 2016
Article

'Meso'-Foundations of Dynamic Capabilities: Team-Level Synthesis and Distributed Leadership as the Source of Dynamic Creativity

By: Ikujiro Nonaka, Ayano Hirose and Yusaku Takeda

This article examines the theoretical foundations of an organization's dynamic capabilities—sensing, seizing, and transforming—from the perspective of organizational knowledge creation. Making a distinction between the creative and adaptive aspects of dynamic... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory; Dynamic Capabilities; Middle-up-down Management; Wise Leadership; Phronesis; Multinational Enterprise; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Multinational Firms and Management; Management Practices and Processes; Creativity; Organizational Structure; Knowledge

January 2013
Case

Austal, Ltd. (A)

By: Willy C. Shih, Margaret Pierson and Dawn H. Lau

Austal, Ltd. was an Australian builder of high-speed passenger ferries. It had translated that expertise into a foothold in the defense market on the US Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program with an Alabama assembly facility. In January 2009 it had just completed... View Details

Educators

August 2016 (Revised December 2016)
Module Note

Strategy Execution Module 2: Building a Successful Strategy

By: Robert Simons

This module reading describes the basics of building a successful strategy. Topics in this module include a discussion of the distinction between corporate and business strategy; how to conduct a SWOT analysis of market dynamics and internal capabilities; the use of... View Details

Keywords: Management Control Systems; Implementing Strategy; Strategy Execution; Business Strategy; Five Forces; Distinctive Capabilities; Emergent Strategy; Mission Statements; Strategy; SWOT Analysis; Competitive Advantage

August 2016
Case

CSI Ingenieros

By: Jay Lorsch and Emily McTague

CSI's business unit managers gathered around the downstairs conference room for the company's weekly meeting to discuss project bids. Cristina WaldAshley Hartman, who was in charge of finding projects for the engineering firm to work on, read through several she had... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Board; Board Committees; Board Dynamics; Organization; Organization Alignment; Dynamic Capabilities; Organization Design; Organizational Prototyping; Organizational Silence; Organizational Learning; Organization Behavior; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Manufacturing Industry; South America; Uruguay

Educators

26 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Japanese Businesses Are So Good at Surviving Crises

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake triggered a powerful tsunami, generating waves higher than 125 feet that ravaged the coast of Japan, particularly the Tohoku region of Honshu, the largest and most populous island in the country. Nearly 16,000 people were... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

31 May 2017
What Do You Think?

Can Amazon Do What Walmart Couldn’t, Stop the 'Wheel of Retailing'?

and mortar big box stores instead. Amazon, unburdened by such real estate, was easily able to mobilize Internet capabilities in order to capture a dominant share of a notoriously inefficient book retailing industry. It didn’t stop there.... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Retail

19 Jul 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition

Keywords: by Gary P. Pisano

2016
Working Paper

Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition

By: Gary P. Pisano

The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage

SSRN

March–April 2024
Article

How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?

By: Gary P. Pisano

Growth—in revenues and profits—is the yardstick by which the competitive fitness and health of organizations is measured. Consistent profitable growth is thus a near universal goal for leaders—and an elusive one.

To achieve that goal, companies need a growth... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Strategy; Organizational Culture

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December 2010
Article

Acquisitions as Exaptation: The Legacy of Founding Institutions in the U.S. Commercial Banking Industry

By: Christopher Marquis and Zhi Huang

This study focuses on the imprinting of institutional environments, particularly how founding institutions impact intra-organizational capabilities and how such imprints may have different external manifestations in subsequent historical eras. We introduce the concept... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Commercial Banking; Organizations; Theory; Policy; Government and Politics; Management Practices and Processes; Strategy; Competency and Skills; United States