Pablo Martin de Holan

Organizational forgetting as strategy

After decades of research, the link between organizational learning and competitive advantage is clear: firms that are better at learning are better positioned to take advantage of emerging opportunities and deal with emerging threats, especially ones that require significant organizational change. Firms that are better able to create new knowledge, ‘learning organizations’, are able to innovate more effectively and adapt to changing environmental conditions more quickly and efficiently, gaining competitive advantage over firms that cannot. Research on the nature of organizational knowledge, the processes that support learning and the barriers that prevent it and the functioning of organizational memory systems has all accumulated rapidly. The result is a well-developed perspective on the management of knowledge that provides an effective framework for research and a useful guide for management practice. We find the progress made in understanding organizational knowledge and organizational learning impressive and the resulting framework useful and convincing. At the same time, based on the results of our research into the knowledge dynamics of international joint ventures (Martin de Holan and Phillips, 2003; Martin de Holan and Phillips, in press; Martin de Holan et al., 2004),1 we believe that one important dimension of knowledge in organizations deserves much more attention: the dynamics of organizational forgetting. We are convinced that competitiveness is not just about learning; it is also about forgetting the right things at the right times. Deeply entrenched stocks of knowledge can act as barriers to new learning, or even to the recognition of the opportunity to innovate a new product, service or business model. Unneeded stocks of knowledge require expensive management and can consume critical management attention, leading to a loss of competitiveness. Increasing numbers of collaborations mean increasing opportunities to pick up bad habits from partners that must be forgotten quickly before they adversely affect competitiveness. Furthermore, firms can overlearn from bad experiences, leading to organizational dysfunction, loss of competitiveness and a critical need to forget. We believe that managers must become as skilled at managing forgetting as they have become at managing learning and, we will argue here, management STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 2(4): 423–433 DOI: 10.1177/1476127004047620 Copyright ©2004 Sage Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

It’s All in Your Head Why We Need Neuroentrepreneurship

In this article, we argue that entrepreneurship researchers would benefit from incorporating methods and technologies from the neurosciences. Many of the phenomena studied in entrepreneurship scholarship invoke the mind of the entrepreneur, and these can be best understood with the emerging technologies used to understand the brain and its works, particularly those that study entrepreneurial cognition and emotion.In this article, we argue that entrepreneurship researchers would benefit from incorporating methods and technologies from the neurosciences. Many of the phenomena studied in entrepreneurship scholarship invoke the mind of the entrepreneur, and these can be best understood with the emerging technologies used to understand the brain and its works, particularly those that study entrepreneurial cognition and emotion.

Firm Experience and Market Entry by Venture Capital Firms (1962-2004)

In this paper, we examine a firms decision to enter new markets as related to the depth and breadth of its experience and the relative distance of those markets. We situate our discussion and analysis in the context of the venture capital (VC) industry, and examine whether and when US VC firms enter five high-technology investment markets through first- or later-round investments. This setting allows us to observe both the firms that chose to enter a new market and those that did not, and analyse the antecedents of these decisions. We find that VC firms overall are less likely to enter distant markets; those with broader experience are more likely to make first-round entries. In addition, VC firms with deeper investment experience are more likely to make first-round entries in proximate markets and less likely to enter distant markets and make later-round entries. These results offer interesting implications for the literature on organizational learning and entrepreneurship.

Agency in Voluntary Organizational Forgetting

This paper studies the different mechanism used in organizations to enact voluntary organizational forgetting. Based on a literature review, previous and original research, four main mechanisms are identified: assets and technologies, routines and procedures, structure and understandings. Each mechanism is discussed and implications are drawn for future research.This paper studies the different mechanism used in organizations to enact voluntary organizational forgetting. Based on a literature review, previous and original research, four main mechanisms are identified: assets and technologies, routines and procedures, structure and understandings. Each mechanism is discussed and implications are drawn for future research.

Management as Life’s Essence: 30 Years of the Nature of Managerial Work

Thirty years ago, Henry Mintzberg published his book The Nature of Managerial Work(1973). By observing how managers perform their everyday tasks and by categorizing what they do, this celebrated book contributed to advancing our understanding of how organizations work, how strategies develop and how they are applied by organizations. In this interview, conducted after a symposium at the 2003 Academy of Management meetings in Seattle, I asked Henry Mintzberg to revisit his work, to reflect on its success and to discuss his current views on management.

Expanding research on corporate corruption, management and organizations

In this special issue introduction, we briefly describe a variety of research paths researchers have followed to study the multifaceted phenomenon of corruption. Furthermore, we classify the papers included in this special issue according to their contribution to these research paths and briefly preview them. Finally, drawing on these four research paths and the papers included in this special issue, we propose a six-item agenda for future research on corruption.

Breaking the Wall: Emotions and Projective Agency Under Extreme Poverty:

In this inductive, exploratory study, we explore how emotions affect the agency of vulnerable persons and their engagement in social innovation to challenge oppressive institutional constraints. By presenting the in-depth case of a successful entrepreneur from a shantytown, we show how emotions affect the construction of a self that contributes to the reproduction of social order rather than change, and how effective interventions can break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness that is dominant among excluded people. We find that this process is fragile and contingent on the presence of known strangers—that is, a web of actors that contributes not only resources but also emotional engagement that helps the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projectivity. We identify mechanisms for and provide a model of the development and emergence of the projective self that is necessary to engage in future-oriented agency.

Editor’s Introduction: The Process of Crafting Resistance

(The) margin of freedom is the basis of the autonomy of struggles over the sense of the social world, its meaning and orientation, its present and its future, one of the major stakes in symbolic struggles. The belief that this or that future, either desired or feared, is possible, probable, or inevitable can, in some historical conditions, mobilise a group around it and so help to favour or prevent the coming of that future.

In Search of the “Entrepreneurial Mindset”:Insights from Neuroscience

The way in which cognitive abilities – affective as well as intellectual – influence the development of the entrepreneurial mindset has been topic of academic discussion for quite some years (Cardon et al, 2005; Grégoire et al, 2010; Krueger & Day 2010). For example, Baron (2007) argued that cognitive abilities in the form of experience are an explanatory factor for why some people identify business opportunities successfully.