Managers are facing unprecedented complexity, volatility, and ambiguity, quickly adapting their decision-making, leadership, vision, and strategies. Megatrends and forces of change have profound implications for business models, processes, and organizational structures, calling into question current paradigms and designing future change. Additionally, unprecedented disruptions, unforecastable in their nature, have increased the need for resilience and strategic flexibility. The book aims at tackling the potential interrelations among environmental transformations, strategic decisions, and leadership to better understand the role of external and internal factors on the effectiveness of managers. The book defines “change”: its extent, nature, and characteristics. Then, it focuses on decision-making, the role of potential cognitive biases, and how the interaction with the perception of determined environmental events affects the way in which decision-makers decide to implement specific strategies. Finally, in the light of waves of strategic change, it reviews theories on leadership and transformation by looking at the role and traits of leaders. Since environmental transformations have the potential to “disrupt” not only strategies but also decision-making processes and leadership, the book provides a review on the issue and propose an integrative framework which can be useful for both scholars and managers, especially in the fields of decision-making and strategy.
This book highlights the growing number of ‘post-bureaucratic’ firms that are abandoning hierarchical organizational forms in favor of self-managing teams. Addressing the need to outperform, these new organization types foresee the benefits of an organic structure with new and more indirect forms of control, and aim to coordinate the activities of highly-skilled workers without relying on a bureaucratic superstructure. The chapters explore the tensions that exist between external and internal institutional forces. As new forms of control strategies emerge, mostly value-based, this book accounts for the cognitive categories, conventions, rules and logic that should be integrated and combined with traditional forms of managerial controls in order to enable co-existence with established bureaucratic frameworks. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of organizational behavior and innovation management, and also practitioners and managers aiming to shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to post-bureaucratic forms.
This book highlights the growing number of ‘post-bureaucratic’ firms that are abandoning hierarchical organizational forms in favor of self-managing teams. Addressing the need to outperform, these new organization types foresee the benefits of an organic structure with new and more indirect forms of control, and aim to coordinate the activities of highly-skilled workers without relying on a bureaucratic superstructure. The chapters explore the tensions that exist between external and internal institutional forces. As new forms of control strategies emerge, mostly value-based, this book accounts for the cognitive categories, conventions, rules and logic that should be integrated and combined with traditional forms of managerial controls in order to enable co-existence with established bureaucratic frameworks. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of organizational behavior and innovation management, and also practitioners and managers aiming to shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to post-bureaucratic forms.
Managers are facing unprecedented complexity, volatility, and ambiguity, quickly adapting their decision-making, leadership, vision, and strategies. Megatrends and forces of change have profound implications for business models, processes, and organizational structures, calling into question current paradigms and designing future change. Additionally, unprecedented disruptions, unforecastable in their nature, have increased the need for resilience and strategic flexibility. The book aims at tackling the potential interrelations among environmental transformations, strategic decisions, and leadership to better understand the role of external and internal factors on the effectiveness of managers. The book defines “change”: its extent, nature, and characteristics. Then, it focuses on decision-making, the role of potential cognitive biases, and how the interaction with the perception of determined environmental events affects the way in which decision-makers decide to implement specific strategies. Finally, in the light of waves of strategic change, it reviews theories on leadership and transformation by looking at the role and traits of leaders. Since environmental transformations have the potential to “disrupt” not only strategies but also decision-making processes and leadership, the book provides a review on the issue and propose an integrative framework which can be useful for both scholars and managers, especially in the fields of decision-making and strategy.
Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who lived and prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena, capital city of the Este Duchy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her protagonists are men and women who stood out within their communities but who, despite their cultural and economic prominence, were ghettoized after 1638. Their sociocultural transformation and eventual legal and political integration evolved through a complex dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities, and without the traumatic ruptures or dramatic divides that led to the assimilation and conversion of many Jews elsewhere in Europe. In Modena, male and female Jewish identities were contoured by both cultural developments internal to the community and engagement with the broader society. The study of Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, liturgical and nondevotional Hebrew poetry, and Sabbateanism existed alongside interactions with Jesuits, converts, and inquisitors. If Modenese Jewish merchants were absent from the public discourse of the Estes, their businesses lives were nevertheless located at the very geographical and economic center of the city. They lived in an environment that gave rise to unique forms of Renaissance culture, early modern female agency, and Enlightenment practice. New Jewish ways of performing gender emerged in the seventeenth century, giving rise to what could be called an entrepreneurial female community devoted to assisting, employing, and socializing in the ghetto. Indeed, the ghetto leadership prepared both Jewish men and women for the political and legal emancipation they would eventually obtain under Napoleon. It was the cultured Modenese merchants who combined active participation in the political struggle for Italian Jewish emancipation with the creation of a special form of the Enlightenment embedded in scholarly and French-oriented lay culture that emerged within the European context.
This volume contains the proceedings of the study convention held in Milan on 11 and 12 April 2003. The objective of these study days was to address the question of the powers of lordship which were exercised in the countryside of central-northern Italy between the mid fourteenth century and the end of the fifteenth century. The discussions focused on what instruments and what foundations of legitimacy these same powers had and what was their relationship with the authority of the prince and with the ordinary citizen, on the one hand, and with the community and the homines on the other. These and various other issues thrown up by the study of feudal power are the topics which emerge in the various contributions gathered in this volume, devoted principally to the Lombardy of the Visconti and the Sforza, but also to other areas of Italy.
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