Joseph L. Bower

Lead from the center. How to manage divisions dynamically.

Despite all thats 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 acquisitions 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 companys assessment of the acquired groups 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.

The Teaching of Strategy From General Manager to Analyst and Back Again

Courses in strategy are an outgrowth of the business policy course first taught at Harvard Business School in 1912. This article examines how the teaching of a course concerned with the development and implementation of the goals and policies of a firm changed during three periods in the postwar period: first, with the introduction of the concept of corporate strategy; second, with the evolution of faculty interest in a concept of competitive strategy more closely grounded in industrial organization economics; and third, with the development of a new course in entrepreneurial management more closely linked to business policys concerns with the general management challenges facing the leaders of modern firms. This history of the course is linked to changes in information technology, financial markets, and the managements of firms as well as related changes in the markets for students and faculty.

The Role of Conflict in Economic Decision-Making Groups: Some Empirical Results

I. Introduction, 263. — II. Developments in normative group decision theory, 264. — III. Questions and an experiment, 267; assumption of a group of rational individuals, 267; two experimental problems: the rational team and the foundation, 268. — IV. The results, 271. — V. Summary and conclusions, 276.

Process Research on Strategic Decisions: A Personal Perspective

Process research on strategic decisions is the body of reports, studies, and investigations focused on that task. This chapter reports on the progress of that work from the perspective of one researcher involved continuously from relatively early on in the process. While the aim is to provide a complete and objective survey, the personal point of view is both clear and limiting. It is significantly shaped by the context of the Harvard Business School. The first section deals with the somewhat distracted intellectual context within which the field developed; the second with some of the halting steps by which process research evolved; the third examines where we are today, and the fourth what might be done to improve the contribution of process research in the future by taking a more disciplined and collective approach.

The two faces of management : an American approach to leadership in business and politics

Surveys methods of technocratic and political management and using case studies, shows how business and government can work together.

On the Amoral Organization

The 1970’s in the United States appear to have opened with an extraordinarily critical attack on the large business corporations as an instrument of achieving societal progress. Dissatisfaction with the quality of life in America today, both the quality of existence it permits and the distribution of the costs and benefits of that existence, are under attack from sources as varied as the new left, the militant black, the radical right, and the so-called ‘silent majority’. In the process of making their critique of American life, one after another of these groups has hit upon the giant business corporations as the source of many of those characteristics of contemporary life which they deplore.

Taking a 'Deep Dive': What Only a Top Leader Can Do

Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the concept of a deep dive, an intervention when top management seizes hold of the substantive content of a strategic initiative and its operational implementation at the project level, as a way to drive new behaviors that enable an organization to shift its performance trajectory into new dimensions unreachable with any of the previously described forms of intervention. We illustrate the power of this previously underexplored change mechanism with a case study, in which a well-established firm overcame barriers to change that were manifest in a wide range of organizational routines and behavioral norms that had been fostered by the pre-existing structural context of the firm.

Systems Analysis for Social Decisions

This paper examines the nature and promise of the revolutionary approach to social problems that is represented by systems analysis. It first describes social decisions and how they are usually made. Then it examines systems analysis, considers its worth for social decisions, and describes some prerequisites required for it to be useful. Finally, the paper concludes that systems analysis of social problems can contribute substantially to the intelligent allocation of society’s resources.

The Organization of Markets

This paper argues that by necessity, persistent competition among players in markets is organized. Once the organized character of markets is recognized, the cooperative elements of markets lose their inevitable harmful characterization in much economic and policy analysis. Further, it is easy and sensible to draw on organization theory to sort out differences among markets as a consequence of the rules and sanctions developed and the role played by leaders. Given the directions taken by modern game theory, it is not a difficult leap to move in this direction. Finally, once the social character of markets is acknowledged by a study of organization, it is possible that normative aspects of social behavior can be exploited in the development of microeconomic policy by governments and business.