Most people agree that preparing for the future is necessary to excel, but doing it effectively is difficult. All risk analyses offer some foresight, but tools based on classic probabilistic calculus open for deception through apparent accuracy in some situations because ambiguity and fuzziness...

This article posits a paradigm of levels of success for strategic decision outcomes. A high level of strategic decision success is normally preceded by a positive strategic gap in which the strengths of the organization clearly outweigh its weaknesses. Three comprehensive cases are set forth as...

Culture is an overarching phenomenon that helps individuals make sense of their world. However, culture is not an unchanging “given.” Members of a society actively create culture and, through their activities and interactions, sustain or change this culture. In an organizational setting,...

The classification of strategic issue terms, as used by managers and management teams in decision making, has previously been shown to have an impact on organizational performance. The question of the extension of such research to include managers in transition economies is less known. In order...

Management decision constitutes the most important thing that managers do. Given the significance and complexity of this activity, one would expect to find a literature in which there is general agreement as to its defining characteristics and dimensions. Such is not the case. Much writing that...

This article is concerned with the decision process and examines the relationships among information attributes, strategic alternatives’ evaluation and group decision support systems (GDSS) in the context of database management. The evaluation of strategic alternatives with multiple criteria...

Selecting the best strategy from among a number of identified alternatives is an important part of any strategy process. Often this involves a difficult choice between the values to set and the trade‐offs to be made. Even swaps is a rational and simple method for making trade‐offs that help...

Organisations are responding to the deeper structural changes taking place in the underlying system of commercial competition by becoming agile and fragmented. In the emergence of such network organisational structures it must be clear how each unit is performing relative to each other and...

The aim of this paper is to determine current management thinking on how the business excellence model (BEM) is used within organisations. In many cases when organisational change models are applied in organisations the emphasis is on advocacy and implementation. There is a need to allow...

Decribes how ESC, a holding company for a gas and electric utility and non‐utility energy business, completed the acquisition of Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution (finance and related applications) at a cost of US$6.5 million in March 1997. From initiation to completion,...