The Corporate Lifecycle: An essay and interviews with Franz Fehrenbach, Jürgen Hambrecht, Wolfgang Reitzle and Alexander Rittweger
132 pages
5 hours of reading
The book explores the critical challenges faced by companies throughout their lifecycle, emphasizing the urgent need for change to avoid failure. It delves into the reasons behind managerial reluctance to recognize and act on impending changes, highlighting the necessity of updating traditional lifecycle concepts. Through this examination, it offers insights into effective strategies for adaptation and survival in a dynamic business environment.
Change or die! With this stark claim begins the journey through the corporate lifecycle. Why do so many companies fail? Why do managers struggle to recognize change early or hesitate to take vigorous action? Why – and how – must the traditional lifecycle concept be modernized if it is still to provide valid orientation? In this essay, Roland Berger CEO Burkhard Schwenker analyzes the challenges facing managers today and explores their implications for good management. Corporate management, he argues, must once again become more direct, more personal, more entrepreneurial. His experienced and thoughtful analysis is complemented by insightful, candid interviews with renowned entrepreneurs and business leaders, conducted by journalist Mario Müller-Dofel. Finally, Schwenker outlines an agenda calling for action in six specific areas.
In a world characterized by increasing complexity and volatility, managers must be able to flexibly adapt their strategies to changing environmental conditions. Traditional strategic management frameworks often fail in this context. Therefore, we present „scenario-based strategic planning“ as a framework for strategic management in an uncertain world. Previous approaches to scenario planning were complex and focused on the long term, but the approach developed by Roland Berger and the Center for Strategy and Scenario Planning at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management is different. By designing appropriate tools and integrating scenario planning into strategic planning, we have made our approach less complex and easier for firms to apply. We illustrate the approach with examples from different industries.
Companies' decision-making and planning systems find themselves in a constant tug of war between strategic and financial considerations. The authors analyze these two opposing currents in business thinking, dissecting their differences and identifying their best practices. They also develop an approach that reconciles the two conflicting schools of thought – without watering down their differences. Schwenker und Spremann argue that both strategic and financial perspectives can serve as a compass in management's decision-making Which perspective to choose depends on the phase of business. The authors distinguish four phases in the company lifecycle – phases in which the business must find the proper position, develop, grow and, ultimately, earn. In the first two phases, strategic considerations should take priority; in the latter two phases, financial considerations rule the day.
As Information Technology becomes a vital part of our everyday activities, ranging from personal use to government and defense applications, the need to develop high-assurance systems increases. Data and applications security and privacy are crucial elements in developing such systems. Research Directions in Data and Applications Security XVIII presents original unpublished research results, practical experiences, and innovative ideas in the field of data and applications security and privacy. Topics presented in this volume -Database theory;-Inference control;-Data protection techniques;-Distributed systems;-Access control models;-Security policy;-Design and management;-Privacy;-Network security. This book is the eighteenth volume in the series produced by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.3 on Data and Applications Security. It contains twenty-three papers and two invited talks that were presented at the Eighteenth Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security, which was sponsored by IFIP and held in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain in July 2004. Research Directions in Data and Applications Security XVIII is a high-quality reference volume that addresses several aspects of information protection, and is aimed at researchers, educators, students, and developers.