This indispensable guide for the creative manager takes readers on a powerful, comprehensive, and illuminating tour through the fields of strategic management. The result is a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A, Comenius University in Bratislava (Department of Management), course: Corporate Management, language: English, abstract: KAPLAN/NORTON suggested an enlargement or change of the BSC perspectives to be able to adjust the scorecard system to the individual situation of each company. They were aware that their four classic perspectives were not the central dimensions for every time, but need to be adjusted, when the economic environment of a company changes. Exactly such a change happened, when the digital economy appeared. That is a main reason, why a new perspective is important to consider the e-business strategy. In practice most of the SME use only the four basic perspectives that are described in the fundamental literature. They do neither dare to create alterations of the perspectives nor to change or modify the shown procedure. These companies need a support, how to add the e-business perspective to consider the digital economy. For this reason it is necessary to give stimulation to the business practice, how to handle goals, structures and initiatives of such a new perspective. There is a permanently increasing supply of hardware and software solutions to support or partly take over the processes of the company. The balanced scorecard respects soft facts in its calculations. In the digital economy these soft facts become more and more important. In former times the managing directors of SME often ignored the knock-on effect of soft facts. They orientated mainly about financial figures. But the digital economy has to consider different strategies. Some statistics depict that even up to 80% of a company's profits in the digital economy depend on soft facts. Managers have to learn dealing with soft facts and intrinsic values. As DRUCKER says, the experience of every employee can be used as a source of value added. An employ

Decision-making, creativity and evaluation need to be supported by formal, structured methods. This edited work will explore the process and then present a range of frameworks, hard and soft methods, and models capable of supporting the process.

Management Strategy: Sustaining Competitive Advantage, 1st edition, by Alfred Marcus, is a strategy book which focuses on how making winning moves is dependent upon finding profitable patterns that repeatedly meet customer demands for solutions. Where many strategy books have lost sight of the purpose of strategy and fail to show how decisions actually affect business performance and ultimately, outcomes, Management Strategy focuses on the types of analyses the industry, environment, and a company's internal resources require to make effective strategic moves. In eight chapters, this textbook builds upon the analysis process and demonstrates how strategy impacts an organization's position in comparison to its competitors, both in terms of the cost and quality of its products and the scope of businesses in which it is involved (vertical and horizontal integration), as well as its global versus domestic reach. The outcomes that come from analyzing an organization also determine the extent to which the organization will strive to be an innovator as opposed to being a follower.

With a focus on the five P's of competitive advantage--power, position, pace, potential, performance--this text selectively applies and adapts the concepts and methods of strategy analysis to the unique constraints and realities of the healthcare industry. It also discusses how to access market structure, an activity that is critically important in today's competitive enviornment. Instructor Resources: Chapter-specific teaching tips, study questions, and PowerPoint slides. To see a sample, click the link in the right-hand navigation bar.

Strategy has emerged as a watchword of modern change efforts. Calls to be strategic are sounded in the private sector, government, philanthropy, and the not-for-profit sectors. Management experts stress the importance of strategic thinking. Change agents are urged to act strategically. Strategic planning has long been a mainstay of organizational development. Leaders in all sectors talk not about theories of change or logic models, but about being strategic: Strategic thinking. Strategic planning. Strategic results. Being strategic. Strategy execution. Effective strategies. Adapting strategically. And, now, evaluating strategy. But strategy is a new unit of analysis for evaluation. Traditionally, evaluation has focused on projects, programs, products, policies, and personnel. What does it mean to treat strategy as the evaluation focus, as the thing evaluated? What is strategy? How does one evaluate strategy? What are the implications of this new direction for evaluation theory, methods, practice, and, ultimately, use? This issue examines these questions and provides examples of strategy-focused evaluations. Evaluating strategy is not about evaluating strategic planning, or even strategic plans. It's about evaluating strategy itself. Strategy is the evaluand. That poses new challenges and offers new opportunities to meet the information needs of evaluation users. For evaluation to be relevant to decision makers and leaders, the focus of the evaluation must be on what they are concerned about and what they care about. Increasingly, they care about identifying and implementing effective strategies. That's where evaluation enters the picture. Evaluating strategy has the purpose of making strategy more effective, differentiating effective from ineffective strategies, and contributing to the ongoing development and adaptation of strategy in response to changing conditions and real-world complexities. Evaluating strategy is a new direction for evaluation, one that is likely to take on increasing importance--if evaluators learn to do it well. This issue takes up that challenge. This is the 128th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation, an official publication of the American Evaluation Association.

These collected works continue to provide the theoretical background for innovative work. This text is also for students of strategy, organizational change and general management courses.