This paper develops and tests a model of how organizational structure influences organizational performance. Organizational structure, conceptualized as the decision-making structure among a group of individuals, is shown to affect the number of initiatives pursued by organizations, and the...

A long-standing question in the organizations literature is whether firms are better-off by using simple or complex representations of their task environment. We address this question by developing a formal model of how firm performance depends on the process by which firms learn and use...

Understanding positioning is a central concern for strategy. We offer a rich, but tractable, formalization of competitive positioning that is explicit about how the success of firms' policy choices in the face of competition is impacted by the multiple attributes along which firms can create...

This paper delves into the effects that strategic representations have on firm performance. It does so in four ways. First, it describes different types of representations—internal, external, and distributed—and it points to their pervasiveness in strategy. Second, it presents a framework to...

Management is fundamentally about making decisions. In organizations, key decisions are often made by groups -- boards, senior management teams, finance committees and so on -- rather than by single individuals. Thus, an important role of the person leading a decision-making team is to know how...