Strategic capital investment decision-making: A role for emergent analysis tools?: A study of practice in large UK manufacturing companies

The complexity surrounding strategic capital investments present challenges to managers charged with evaluating these projects. In particular over-reliance on financial appraisal tools is thought to bias decision-makers against undertaking strategic projects that are crucial to the development of business capability and innovation. In response to this concern, several emergent analysis tools have been advanced as means to integrate strategic and financial analyses of capital investment projects. This paper examines the use of both conventional financial analysis tools and selected emergent analysis approaches in the capital investment decision-making of large UK manufacturing companies.The findings update previous studies on the use of financial analysis tools, but also examine how their use varies between strategic and non-strategic investment projects and the extent to which emergent analysis tools are impacting decision-making practice. Little evidence emerges of integration between strategic and financial analysis approaches. Financial analysis techniques still dominate the appraisal of all categories of capital investment projects, while risk analysis approaches remain simplistic, even for complex strategic projects. Despite their noted potential for informing strategic investment decisions, the emergent analysis tools barely register in practice. The appraisal of capital projects seems to reflect a ‘simple is best’ philosophy and a commitment to the role of intuition and judgement in assessing how the strategic dimensions of capital investments connect with their financial outcomes.     

基于低碳经济视角的企业战略成本管理

低碳经济是以低能耗、低排放、低污染为特征的社会经济模式。它对解决人类面临的气候变暖危机以及经济的持续增长问题提供了一种双赢选择。但由于发展低碳经济前期需要加大成本投入,成本问题将使低碳经济发展面临一定的压力和挑战。如何从战略成本的角度,分析我国发展低碳经济的成本因素,在低碳经济模式下进行企业战略成本管理具有重要的理论意义和现实意义。     

城市商业银行战略转型问题研究

近年来,城市商业银行（以下简称城商行）外部经营环境发生了非常重要而深刻的变化,原本传统的增长方式、盈利模式、营销模式等面临重大挑战。为此,适应形势发展,加快推进战略转型,对城商行而言具有现实的紧迫感和深远的历史意义。本文借鉴国内外中小银行战略转型的实践经验,结合当前城商行业务经营中面临的问题,运用实证分析方法,从战略目标、管理体制、资本管理等方面对城商行战略转型提出对策建议,以期对城商行战略发展提供有益的借鉴。     

Strategic foresight in public policy: Reviewing the experiences of the UK, Singapore, and the Netherlands

In an interdependent and complex world, only few public policy challenges can be confined to one particular policy area anymore. Many governments have realized that a single-issue focus is often insufficient in dealing with emerging threats and opportunities. They have therefore started to experiment with strategic foresight that deliberately cuts across the traditional boundaries of policy areas and government departments. This article reviews the foresight activities of three countries that have been at the forefront of this trend: the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Netherlands. To this end, the article discusses the concept of strategic foresight and explains the two distinct ways in which it contributes to public policy-making: on the one hand, it informs policy by providing more systematic knowledge about relevant trends and developments in an organization's environments; on the other hand, it acts as a driver of reflexive mutual social learning processes among policy-makers that stimulate the generation of common public policy visions. The article concludes by drawing lessons with regard to the key success factors allowing strategic foresight to make an effective contribution to public policy-making.     

The technology of benefits outsourcing: helping employees help themselves

The exponential growth of health plan offerings and increased use of defined contribution retirement plans has caused a fundamental shift in the way that benefits management is done. Specifically, the authors point out that we are moving into an era of "self-service" in employee benefits, with employees often taking the role of management of their own benefits through use of technology. Outsourcing benefits management through the use of technology has meant the role of HR departments has shifted from personnel administrators to strategic business partners. By outsourcing administrative functions and maximizing the power of new interactive technology, human resource departments are able to focus on the strategic needs of the company to adapt to the challenges of the future.     

互联网金融崛起与商业银行转型研究

随着互联网对人类社会的全面渗透和互联网技术的革新,互联网金融迅速崛起,以其成本、效率、信息和体验上的巨大优势,全面冲击着银行业金融中介的主体地位,同时也带来了银行经营转型的重要战略契机。在互联网金融时代,银行业如何应对挑战、把握机遇,成为业界关注的重大课题。     

A survey of key success factors in financial services marketing and brand management

What challenges and opportunities do financial services marketers face as they strive to improve marketing and brand performance, relevance, value and accountability within their organisations? To help answer this question, MCorp., a strategic brand and marketing consultancy, surveyed marketing executives from 67 financial services institutions across the USA in the autumn of 2004. The survey grouped responses into several categories, ranging from an understanding of how marketing and brand performance is tracked, to respondents' views on specific challenges to improve marketing and branding effectiveness. Across all categories, data drove two ‘big-picture’ conclusions which reveal key strategic issues facing financial services marketers today. First, there is a stated lack of brand and marketing performance information, and an absence of the systems and programmes to track it. Secondly, there is a perceived lack of top-down organisational understanding of the importance, value and meaning of brand within respondent organisations. Within the overall context of these conclusions, analysis led to a series of key findings, and drove specific recommendations for addressing the issues raised. While the illustrations given are based on data gathered from institutions in the USA, the author's experience suggests that the conclusions and attendant recommendations can serve as a basis for process and performance improvement in any financial services institution.     

Scenarios to challenge strategic paradigms: Lessons from 2025

As a process looking for alternative visions of environment and corporate futures, scenario planning challenges strategic paradigms. In that way, scenario planning is dealing with the different beliefs of the many actors who make the organization and its global and business environments. Among these beliefs, emerging ideologies are one of the main shaping factors for the construction of new visions of corporate environment and corporate futures. To analyse the interaction between scenario planning and emerging ideologies, this paper will first propose a conceptual framework based on the dynamics of strategic paradigms. Second, it will discuss Electricité de France 2025 scenarios longitudinal case study in the context of the diffusion process of the French so called prospective approach to show interests and traps of scenario planning to manage paradigm shifts.     

Not all M&As are alike--and that matters

Despite all that's been written about mergers and acquisitions, even the experts know surprisingly little about them. The author recently headed up a year-long study sponsored by Harvard Business School on the subject of M&A activity. In-depth findings will emerge over the next few years, but the research has already revealed some interesting results. Most intriguing is the notion that, although academics, consultants, and businesspeople lump M&As together, they represent very different strategic activities. Acquisitions occur for the following reasons: to deal with overcapacity through consolidation in mature industries; to roll up competitors in geographically fragmented industries; to extend into new products and markets; as a substitute for R&D; and to exploit eroding industry boundaries by inventing an industry. The different strategic intents present distinct integration challenges. For instance, if you acquire a company because your industry has excess capacity, you have to determine which plants to shut down and which people to let go. If, on the other hand, you buy a company because it has developed an important technology, your challenge is to keep the acquisition's best engineers from jumping ship. These scenarios require the acquiring company to engage in nearly opposite managerial behaviors. The author explores each type of M&A--its strategic intent and the integration challenges created by that intent. He underscores the importance of the acquiring company's assessment of the acquired group's culture. Depending on the type of M&A, approaches to the culture in place must vary, as will the level to which culture interferes with integration. He draws from the experiences of such companies as Cisco, Viacom, and BancOne to exemplify the different kinds of M&As.     

Using the Balanced Scorecard to Manage Intangible Assets in A Sino-Foreign Joint Venture

The application of the balanced scorecard as a performance measurement tool to convert intangible assets into tangible outcomes is examined using a case study of a Sino-US joint venture — Xinan JV. The balanced scorecard is described in terms of the specific measures that were used to manage various innovation and human resource development processes and initiatives to help the company respond to its strategic challenges. We present some impressions of the managers of the company on how the balanced scorecard facilitated the management of intangibles in the joint venture.     

山东省金融IC卡推广的有效途径探析

金融IC卡是银行卡产业发展的重要趋势。近年来山东省支付产业发展迅速,金融IC卡的推广也面临重要的机遇和挑战。本文对山东省金融IC卡推广情况进行了深入分析,并提出了山东省金融IC卡推广的有效途径。     

Upgrading EC strategic choice capacities

The EC faces difficult strategic choices which constitute fuzzy gambles with history. Available capacities, however successful in the past, are inadequate for meeting new challenges. Required are upgrading in political will, realistic visions, policy cogitation, and implementation. Operational recommendations include: preserving and strengthening the authority of the Commission; changing voting rules in the Council, while avoiding membership increases until this is accomplished; building up coherent economic, internal, and external relations-security decision processes; encouraging utopian thinking on EC futures; strengthening coherent policy making by fortifying the Commission Presidency; installation of crisis decision making modalities; reinforcing implementation consideration, monitoring and facilitation; intensive training of high-level Commission staff in strategic choice analysis; establishment of an EC Policy College; and setting up a central EC Think Tank together with improvement of pluralistic EC policy R&D. Since the future is shaped by necessity, chance and choice, upgraded strategic choice does not guarantee the desired effects, but is imperative in terms of both morality and effectiveness.     

The challenges of risk society for impact assessment

This paper takes its point of departure in Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society and the aspects that characterise this society. The paper puts forward a hypothesis, on which theoretical challenges the characteristics of risk society pose to impact assessment as a decision support tool; namely, the challenge of delivering assessments and predictions and the challenge of handling differences of opinion and debate. Through a case example of integration of climate change in strategic environmental assessment, the paper uses empirical evidence from a survey and a series of interviews to carry out a preliminary discussion of how the theoretical challenges are reflected in practice. The case study results show that the challenge of delivering assessments and predictions in a risk society is reflected in the current state of practice, while the challenge of handling differences of opinion and debate is not clearly reflected.     

ERP in action — Challenges and benefits for management control in SME context

ERP systems have fundamentally re-shaped the way business data is collected, stored, disseminated and used throughout the world. However, the existing research in accounting has provided only relatively few empirical findings on the implications for management control when companies implement ERP systems as the technological platform. Especially scarce are the findings concerning the production phase, after implementation, when the information processes, related work practices and the new information contents can be seen as established. In this paper we explored and theorized the benefits, challenges and problems for management control when an ERP system is in use, four years after the implementation. Our findings also illustrate why and under what circumstances these challenges and benefits may exist. For a holistic view of the organization our findings, based on a qualitative case study, are constructed from the viewpoints of people at different levels and functions of the organization. Top management expected a new strategic control system, but due to the many challenges it ended up with merely financial accounting based control. At the operational level, serious challenges lead to inadequate usage of the ERP system. Management control produces the financial basic data and must contend with many practical problems caused by ERP implementation.     

Funder demands for quality management in the non-profit sector: challenges and responses in a non-profit infrastructure network

External pressure by funders can be a catalyst for a more proactive and strategic approach to quality management in the non-profit sector, however it can also lead to cynical responses which do little to promote learning and improvement. This case study of a national infrastructure organization that supports a network of local non-profit organizations provides insight into the attitudes and challenges that can arise from such external, top-down pressure.     

The fruitful flaws of strategy metaphors

The business world is rife with metaphors these days, as managers look to other disciplines for insights into their own challenges. And metaphors can--despite their somewhat flaky image--be powerful catalysts for generating new business strategies. But metaphors are often improperly used, their potential left unrealized. We tend to look for reassuring parallels in business metaphors instead of troubling differences, the author contends. In fact, using metaphors to come up with new strategic perspectives begins to work only when the metaphors themselves don't work, or at least don't seem to. Take the following case in point. An insurance company's corporate headquarters put together a team of experts to discuss ways the firm might respond to the challenges of conducting business via the Internet. Once the team drafted a master plan, the idea was that it would be promulgated to the individual agents and offices of this widely dispersed organization. In a meeting with the company's top managers, the author talked about Charles Darwin's conceptual breakthrough in formulating the principles of evolution. As his overview of Darwin's theories about variation and natural selection gave way to questions, a heretical notion took shape: Those far-flung agents' offices, instead of being strategic liabilities in a suddenly virtual age, might instead be the mechanism for achieving an incremental but powerful corporate transformation in response to the changing business environment. But it was only when the evolutionary metaphor began to break down--when the elements of Darwin's theory clearly were at odds with the besieged insurance company's situation--that real strategic insight occurred. This anecdote offers, in a compressed form, an example of how the process of using metaphors can play out and what managers can learn from it.     

The scaling-up of Neighbourhood Care: From experiment towards a transformative movement in healthcare

To meet present and future challenges in healthcare, radically new approaches are needed that contribute to transforming the healthcare system. In the Netherlands this transition was envisioned by the Transition Programme Long-term Care (2007–2010) as “a fundamental change towards a more human centred, affordable and socially embedded healthcare system”. One of the experiments in this programme was Neighbourhood Care (in Dutch “Buurtzorg”): small-scale, self-managed teams of nurses who provide high-quality homecare in neighbourhoods. This article looks at Buurtzorg from the perspective of transition studies, building on the framework of ‘deepening, broadening and scaling-up’ transition experiments. We analyse how Buurtzorg could rapidly develop from a local experiment to a network of more than 800 teams and also spread to different care domains and abroad. The rapid development of Buurtzorg is explained by identifying their strategic activities, the alignment of contextual factors and their strategic position as outsider towards the regime. We conclude that Buurtzorg has become a ‘symbol’ in a transformative movement that can contribute to a future transition in healthcare. This case study contributes to theoretical and practice-oriented knowledge on how a transition experiment in a social domain can surpass the experimental phase, identifying key strategic activities for niche-mainstreaming.     

次贷危机后我国银行业海外业务发展策略研究

当前,我国银行业的海外业务发展程度不高,不仅海外资产、机构、人员和利润占比低,海外区位分布也较为单一,这与我国的经济实力并不相称。次贷危机后,我国银行业的海外业务发展迎来了难得的历史性机遇,但同时也还需应对不少挑战。本文在分析我国银行业海外业务发展情况的基础上,对次贷危机后我国银行业如何加快海外市场的拓展步伐提出了具体的策略建议。     

如何提升授信审批在信贷结构调整中的战略价值

当前,国内外经济金融环境正发生着深刻的变化,机遇与挑战并存。我省提出的加快经济增长方式转变和总行提出的加快经营转型都要求我们必须主动加快信贷结构调整,使信贷结构更好地与宏观经济政策和地区经济发展相适应,与全行资产负债结构相匹配。在国家新一轮宏观经济调控周期和银行信贷政策调整过程中,授信审批工作如何从突出信贷结构调整的战略高度,结合信贷结构调整中面临的问题不断优化客户、产品、行业、期限、收益结构,并在审批理念、审批体制机制、审批服务、审批队伍建设等方面进一步提升授信审批的战略价值,保障其职能作用的有效发挥,对此,本文进行了一些积极探索。