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This chapter develops a framework for assessing the value generated by both the option-like and competitive characteristics of an acquisition strategy. The conceptual approach is based on real options and principles from game theory. It illustrates the approach with an example of how real options and games thinking were used in strategic decision making at a major pharmaceutical company. The method treats an acquisition strategy as a package of corporate real options actively managed by the firm in a context of competitive responses or changing market conditions. This framework can help management answer several questions that are important for a successful acquisition strategy: How valuable are the growth opportunities created by the acquisition? How can we best sequence the acquisition options in the strategy? When is it appropriate to grow organically, and when are strategic acquisitions the preferred route? How is the industry likely to respond, and how will that affect the value of our acquisitions and future targets? The subsequent sections present a series of frameworks to address these questions.

This chapter introduces the final building block in the story of corporate growth: the strategic investment decisions — that is, decisions that determine the company's future evolution and its growth. It is sometimes said that such decisions provide the explanation for a company's growth, which is true, but only in part. Another essential factor in explaining corporate growth is discussed in this chapter: the strategic decisions and, in particular, the investment decisions that commit the company's future course to a particular direction for a long period of time. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that a critical factor in managing corporate growth is the rigor with which the company chooses and appraises certain strategic decision — particularly, investment decisions — that may have a decisive impact on its future and performance.

Strategy making in many financial services firms is dominated by the desire to control risks, steer resources into profitable areas, and make incremental adjustments to the existing business model. Innovative strategic thinking that penetrates the organization from the lower ranks of the firm is rare. The narrow regulatory framework and inflexible IT systems often contribute to a fairly centralized approach to strategic decision-making in financial services firms. This chapter describes how financial services firms can accelerate their strategic metabolisms and fuel strategic thinking processes with energy. It shows how strategy processes should be designed for firms to lead to unique strategic positions.

Justices differ on whether the oral arguments affect their decisions on cases. Both Justice William Brennan and Chief Justice William Rehnquist observed that, on occasion, the oral argument changed their minds. But Justice Clarence Thomas believes that most justices have made up their minds before hearing these arguments. This chapter relates the role of the oral arguments to different theories about how justices decide cases.

This chapter presents a conceptual model that seeks to explain the growth of the firm. This model considers that corporate growth and the growth process itself are dependent simultaneously on the five variables presented in earlier chapters, one of which is resources and capabilities. The relationship with resources and capabilities is straightforward. These are not limiting factors, but they do mark certain opportunities for action and the possibilities of success that a particular action may have. Thus, the decision to diversify has to look, not only at the other company's businesses from the market viewpoint, but also at the possibility of deploying resources and capabilities in the new business that the company previously used in other businesses. There is a clear relationship between strategic decisions and the firm's external context. The industry and the external context has contributed to shaping the company's competitive position at a certain time through the intersection process.

This chapter discusses changes in the information gathered by a certain organization. Since organizations require information to change, new information must be sought. Of all information acquired by large firms, financial information is valued the most, for most organizations' strategic decisions are based on these. The more information is gathered, the easier it is for it to be controlled, but it is more difficult to learn. When less information is gathered, it is much easier for it to be learned, but more difficult for it to be controlled.

The Ultimatum Game was played with a group of traditional big game hunters: the Lamalera whalers of Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, whose community is described in the first section of the chapter. The methods used for the study are then outlined and the results presented and discussed. The results were consistent in some ways with those from trials in western societies, with the primary difference that there were a number of cases of hyper‐fairness: one interpretation offered of these cases is that the whale hunters made strategic decisions when they made fair offers, but other explanations are also examined on the basis of the results of various cross‐cultural studies (including those in this book). These focus on the rejection of both fair and hyper‐fair offers in the Ultimatum Game (which have been interpreted as indicating an unwillingness to punish), and the issue of the variance seen in the cross‐cultural sample in this book in relation to fairness, for which strategic risk reduction is one explanation, but reputation effects are another, and the best model incorporates market integration and payoff to cooperation. The final section of the chapter discusses evolutionary theory and adaptive responses in relation to human cooperative behaviour.

In this chapter we examine the symbolic management of social processes in firm leadership and governance. We explain how firm leaders engage in verbal impression management about their strategic advice network, and how such communication is decoupled from their actual advice-seeking behavior. We go on to describe how firms gain legitimacy by adopting participative strategic decision-making programs that ostensibly use cutting-edge information technology to solicit input, despite decoupling the programs from actual strategic decision making. We then consider how and when firms manage impressions about the diversity and inclusiveness of firm leadership, and how such rhetoric may also be decoupled from actual decision-making processes. We conclude that the symbolic management of social and organizational processes in firm leadership is among the most efficient and effective means of increasing the legitimacy of firm governance and strategy.

In the United States, the explicit representation of workforce interests in strategic decision-making processes of corporations is rare. Participation in strategic decisions—those that affect the basic direction of the company—is unusual even when workforce interests are represented collectively through labor unions. This chapter examines labor-management experiments with two institutions through which strategic participation for unions might be realized: negotiated union-management partnership agreements and union representation on corporate boards. It first considers the problem of corporate governance and reviews the rationale for strategic partnerships. It then discusses the prevalence of partnerships in the United States and describes negotiated partnerships as well as union involvement in corporate boards of directors. The chapter assesses the challenges and dilemmas unions face in seeking strategic partnerships and concludes with observations on public policy.

This chapter discusses the emerging risk landscape and considers the value creating potential of uncertainty. Assuming a strategic decision-making perspective it is argued that risk management practices can help firms make better decisions for better risk-return outcomes. Effects of imperfect information and cognitive biases are considered, as are different ways to avoid them. It is shown how systematic risk analysis can help reduce information distortion and how these techniques can challenge forward looking strategic plans as well as ongoing project investments. The human limitations in making advance predictions under uncertainty are illustrated by predictable surprises. It is discussed how the value of effective risk management derive from dynamic processes that shield against downside losses and pursue prudent strategic risk-taking for upside potential. The role of innovation in developing upside gain is discussed as is the individual human involvement in these value creating activities. (143 words)

This chapter covers the company's evolution over time and its growth patterns are closely related with its external context — that is, the opportunities that an industry offers its firms. These opportunities do not totally limit its growth potential, but they undoubtedly have a notable effect on the growth process. The evaluation of the external context can start with a consideration of the attractiveness of the industry. The industry's value chain offers a complementary view of the external context including a way to analyze the external opportunities that a company may have and how it can use them to foster growth. This chapter also discusses the effort of the external context on the company's positioning in its industry by using the industry's value chain. This is a key aspect, because it shows how the company is capable not only of making use of external opportunities but also of creating them through its positioning and some strategic decisions.

Strategy is about being different and about making hard choices but a university community is governed by consensus and therefore resists direction from the top and has difficulty choosing between competing priorities generated from below that create winners and losers. Nevertheless, external forces such as changing demographics, financial realities and emerging technology will force rapid change either voluntarily or involuntarily. The schools that survive will be those who develop an effective strategy and stick to it.

This chapter discusses how resources, mobilization structures, political opportunities, and the dynamics of contention influence strategy. A report examined here about an animal rights protest exhibits several elements of social movement strategy. First, strategy includes decisions about tactics, claims, targets, and alliances; second, the intervention of state authorities changes the available options for everyone; third, movements are not unitary actors; and fourth, strategic decisions are debatable. The chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating social movement strategy, highlights the constraints that activists face in making strategic decisions, and maintains that strategic decisions are shaped by interactions among groups of participants. It depicts the overall complexity and emotionality of strategic choice, as well as the ongoing interactions involved in collective action.

This chapter examines contemporary theory and research on boards of directors in strategic management. After briefly reviewing the evolution of research on corporate boards and strategic management, we describe contemporary theoretical perspectives and emerging topics in the literature, and identify a variety of future research opportunities. We then turn to recent research in the rapidly growing literature on venture boards and strategy. Our review of recent work on boards of public companies and new ventures reveals a common emphasis on behavioral processes in the boardroom, in dyadic CEO-board interactions outside the boardroom, and in relations between directors and external constituents. We describe numerous opportunities to extend these complementary literatures by linking behavioral processes in boards to issues of diversity, technology and innovation, culture and institutions, and competitive strategy.

This chapter examines the evolution of political economies in the ancient Titicaca Basin region. It describes the development of complex political economies in the Titicaca Basin as a process of the strategic decisions of individuals. It suggest that this evolution was the result of the successive renegotiating and reworking of the political and economic relationships between individuals and groups attempting to acquire power, wealth and prestige in a particular historical, cultural, and physical environment.

This chapter examines the practicalities of conducting targeted killing operations. It discusses the ten-point criteria that can help the criteria-based approach to targeted killing. These ten-point checklist include local community reactions to previous targeted killings, political circumstances that preclude conducting a targeted killing and predicted/expected consequences if an otherwise legitimate targeted killing is not conducted. This chapter also evaluates six specific targeted killing decisions that illustrate the tension between strategic and tactical decision-making regarding particular individuals and are instructive with respect to application of “self-defense”.

This chapter examines market, political, informational, and capacity factors that are expected to influence the initiation of certification programs in different sectors. It begins by reviewing research on institutional development to advance an evolutionary perspective for private governance, paying particular attention to path dependence in markets and politics. It then considers expectations about how certification programs will evolve based on the interplay of actors' strategic decisions and the program's internal governance structures. It also discusses gaps in the literature with respect to the development of social and environmental certification programs. The chapter concludes by looking at insights on how best to address these gaps.

In this chapter we summarize and synthesize key tenets of the symbolic management perspective on corporate governance and strategy. We discuss opportunities for future research on the forms and processes of symbolic management. We call for research on different audiences of symbolic management (e.g., lower-level managers and employees), different subjects of symbolic management (e.g., corporate transparency, executive succession, and various aspects of the decision-making process, such as the use of performance feedback), and different forms of symbolic management (e.g., cooperative and competitive forms). We then propose symbolic management theory as a powerful and comprehensive approach to the study of organizational behaviour more broadly, and conclude by describing managerial and public policy implications of our theory.

In this chapter we examine social network ties among firm leaders as a key determinant of symbolic management. After reviewing extant theory about the role of board interlock ties in symbolic management, we explain how other kinds of ties between firm leaders facilitate various forms of symbolic action and decoupling, including (1) director ties between informal groups of firm leaders, (2) social exchange ties between leaders, (3) personal friendship ties between leaders, and (4) mutual ties to management consultants. In suggesting how network ties facilitate decoupling, we also reveal a separation between appearances and reality with respect to the social structure of corporate leadership, wherein corporate stakeholders tend to underestimate the prevalence of social connections among firm leaders, and the resulting frequency of leader communication, cooperation, and collusion.