Klaasjan Visscher

Capturing the competence of management consulting work

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to assess whether the effort of consulting firms and branch organizations to establish a shared and standardized methodology as a means to professionalize consulting and as a standard for training is possible and sensible. - Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted among Dutch management consultants, which explored their ways of working and their ways of learning. - Findings: The study shows that efforts to develop a shared and standardized phase-model methodology do not seem to be effective. Instead of following phase-models, consultants appear to be improvising bricoleurs, tailoring their ways of working to specific situations, and using broad, heterogeneous and partly implicit repertoires, which are built through mainly through action-learning. This requires another kind of methodology and another kind of training. - Research limitations/implications: The article gives a general direction for the development of a consulting methodology and the education of consultants. Further research on consulting practices and repertoires is necessary to explore this direction. - Practical implications: The paper concludes that the value of phase-models as a standard is limited. Therefore, branch organizations, consulting firms and corporate universities should not focus their professionalization and training activities on these standardized methods. - Originality/value: Little work has been done yet on the relation between professionalization, methods, and training in management consulting, and no earlier publication has studied this topic quantitatively.

Operational effectiveness and strategic flexibility: scales for performance assessment of new product development systems

Many firms attribute a central role to their New Product Development (NPD) function, in speeding up time to market, improving product quality, increasing manufacturing efficiency, building core competence and increasing innovative ability, often all within one and the same NPD system. This balancing of short-term operational effectiveness and longer-term strategic flexibility requires accurate insight in NPD performance on both dimensions. This paper reports on the operationalisation of these constructs based on NPD success literature, using a subdivision in product concept effectiveness and NPD process effectiveness. A validation test of the subjective scales shows good reliability results. Preliminary analysis of test results (n = 29) seems to point at firms trying to both exploit and explore by adapting the NPD process, and the building of dynamic capabilities.

Coping with chaos in change processes

In their efforts to change organizations, managers and change consultants are time and again confronted with the limited controllability of organizations, the complexity and indeterminacy of change processes and the uncertain and ambiguous effects of their actions. In short, they are confronted with chaos. Some managers and consultants try to enhance their (illusion of) control over organizations by attempting to reduce chaos, while others accept and embrace chaos and base their change practice on it. This article focuses on the second group. Based on a study of literature and a series of interviews with experienced change consultants, a typology is developed, in which an enlightened modern, an ironic, and a postmodern way of coping with chaos in change processes is elaborated. The typology may help change consultants and managers with the development of their way of working and the articulation of their professional identity.

Cycles and Diamonds: How Management Consultants Diverge and Converge in Organization Design Processes

Divergence and convergence are both important elements of organizational design processes. This is often stated in the normative design literature, but it has hardly been studied empirically. How do designers of organizations diverge and converge in practice? Do they first develop alternatives and then choose the best one? Do they go through one or more successive cycles? And what makes them choose a certain route? In an in-depth study of management consulting, we identified five different routes for diverging and converging in practice: one route for simple situations and four routes for complex situations. These routes differ in their sequence of activities, in their use of alternative solutions, and in their focus on content or on politics. It is shown that most design processes appear diamond-shaped, with a divergent and a convergent side, but that these diamonds are often coloured or even fake, especially in socio-politically complex situations. Pseudo-divergence, i.e., the process of apparent divergence in public, is widespread.

Rise and Fall of an Innovative Organisation: The Innovation Journey of Ericsson Enschede

This paper presents a case history of an Ericsson design centre in the Netherlands, from its founding in 1990 till its dramatic end in 2003. The paper describes the development of the organisation over the years — its origins, the abundant growth, the many organisational and technological metamorphoses it underwent and the eventual downfall. The purpose of this paper is to search for patterns in the dynamics of internationally operating R&D organisations and to clarify the peculiarities in the innovation journey of this Ericsson design centre. In particular, we focus on the actions of local R&D managers, the design of organisational forms, the relation between technology and organisation, and the relation between local design centres and their headquarters.

Exploration Patterns in Fast-growing Entrepreneurial Firms: A Multiple Case Study in the Internet Technology Industry

Based on the seminal paper of March (1991), numerous scholars (e.g. Ahuja & Lampert, 2001; Elfring & Hulsink, 2003; Tushman & Anderson, 1986) emphasize that realizing technological change requires exploration or activities such as creative search, experimentation, improvisation, and technology probing. At the same time, it has been emphasized that exploration of new technological capabilities is a fragile and time-consuming process that triggers organizational tensions and costs. Academic research on exploration (e.g. Belderbos et al., 2010; Jansen et al., 2006; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2004; Uotila et al., 2009) has therefore substantially increased during the past decade, providing valuable insights into the organizational challenges and performance implications of exploration. At the same time, it needs to be noticed that this research stream is dominated by cross-sectional studies which typically focus on how large established firms can stimulate exploration within and outside their organizational boundaries. In this paper, we want to complement previous research on exploration in two important ways.

Achieving sustained innovation performance through strategic flexibility of new product development

Sustained innovation performance is traditionally measured in terms of New Product Development (NPD) Strategic Flexibility (SF), which is defined as the readiness to adapt to, anticipate or create future NPD performance requirements. SF is seen as a prerequisite to NPD Operational Effectiveness (OE). This article analyses the innovation performance and NPD portfolio balance of more than 200 companies in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Norway and Turkey. A factor analysis leads us to suggest that SF actually is only made possible in practice by OE and quality of market information; both of these factors thus jointly lead to sustained innovation. Also, we suggest that flexible strategies are the best choices for current Western business environments such as our sample. Further analyses and some clarifying case studies will be conducted to strengthen or reject either of these propositions.

Organisational patterns in new product development: contrasting The Netherlands, Finland and Portugal

Companies pursuing competitive advantage through continuous innovation are confronted with the tension between todays work and tomorrows innovation. This paper reports on the search for so-called patterns in NPD. In order to investigate whether different types of consistent NPD configurations might be identified through a quantitative research design, a quick scan using a structured questionnaire was carried out in Dutch, Portuguese and Finnish firms (n = 82). The results highlight some practices in NPD configurations that could be related to key success factors identified in best practice studies, such as a dedicated project organisation, an organisational culture fostering personal engagement and encouraging individuality and creativity, and a strategic NPD programme with a long-term thrust. The results also indicate a pattern of variety among the different countries and a first indication of possible relationships between NPD strategy, structure and culture based on a bivariate correlation analysis.

Research and Development as a Competence Creating Business in a Business

Research and development departments in industrial firms may not take it for granted anymore that they are the only preferred supplier of research and development to the company of which they are a part. The growing need to be innovative and the increasing availability of innovative competencies on the market result in a pressure on these departments to become more business–like and to reconsider their sources of competitive advantage over other (potential) suppliers of research and development. Traditionally, scientific and technological knowledge and skills concerning the product were the prime source. Nowadays, managerial competencies and the ability to work for and with your clients and suppliers are becoming more important. To become a competitive business in a business, research and development departments should create the competencies that enable them to create value for their clients. This calls for good competence management, comprising management of human resources, information technology, and internal and external interfaces. In this paper we explore what it means and what it takes for research and development departments to implement competence management, elaborating it theoretically and describing a case of competence management in the research and development department of a European car company.

Bricolage and Identity Work

Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage has been used widely in a variety of management and organizational studies to highlight creative ‘situational tinkering’. Yet, we know little about ‘the bricoleur’ beyond the assumption of a functional agent responding to conditions of resource scarcity or environmental complexity. As such, studies offer limited possibilities in explaining the occurrence of bricolage in the absence of external demands, or much about who the bricoleur is. Drawing on 136 in-depth interviews with management consultants, this study argues for a richer understanding of bricolage by exploring the identity of the bricoleur. In doing so, the paper achieves three outcomes. First, it uses the original symbolic and cultural insights of bricolage made by Levi-Strauss to detail how bricoleur identities are constructed; Second, it highlights how different organizational strategies enable and constrain the pursuit of bricoleur identities; Finally, it emphasizes the bricoleurs status as primarily an aspirational elite identity in the context of consultancy work, in contrast to its usual treatment as a ‘low status’ activity.