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"Bower, Joseph L"
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CUSTOMER POWER, STRATEGIC INVESTMENT, AND THE FAILURE OF LEADING FIRMS
Why might firms be regarded as astutely managed at one point, yet subsequently lose their positions of industry leadership when faced with technological change? We present a model, grounded in a study of the world disk drive industry, that charts the process through which the demands of a firm's customers shape the allocation of resources in technological innovation-a model that links theories of resource dependence and resource allocation. We show that established firms led the industry in developing technologies of every sort-even radical ones-whenever the technologies addressed existing customers' needs. The same firms failed to develop simpler technologies that initially were only useful in emerging markets, because impetus coalesces behind, and resources are allocated to, programs targeting powerful customers. Projects targeted at technologies for which no customers yet exist languish for lack of impetus and resources. Because the rate of technical progress can exceed the performance demanded in a market, technologies which initially can only be used in emerging markets later can invade mainstream ones, carrying entrant firms to victory over established companies.
Journal Article
HER2/HER3 regulates lactate secretion and expression of lactate receptor mRNA through the MAP3K4 associated protein GIT1
One of the major features of cancer is Otto Warburg’s observation that many tumors have increased extracellular acidification compared to healthy tissues. Since Warburg’s observation, the importance of extracellular acidification in cancer is now considered a hallmark of cancer. Human MAP3K4 functions upstream of the p38 and JNK mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPKs). Additionally, MAP3K4 is required for cell migration and extracellular acidification of breast cancer cells in response to HER2/HER3 signaling. Here, we demonstrate that GIT1 interacts with MAP3K4 by immunoprecipitation, while cellular lactate production and the capacity of MCF-7 cells for anchorage independent growth in soft agar were dependent on GIT1. Additionally, we show that activation of HER2/HER3 signaling leads to reduced expression of lactate receptor (GPR81) mRNA and that both, GIT1 and MAP3K4, are necessary for constitutive expression of GPR81 mRNA. Our study suggests that targeting downstream proteins in the HER2/HER3-induced extracellular lactate signaling pathway may be a way to inhibit the Warburg Effect to disrupt tumor growth.
Journal Article
The Entrepreneurial M-Form: Strategic Integration in Global Media Firms
Many researchers believe that bounded rationality prevents CEOs in large, complex, multidivisional (\"M-form\") corporations from personally formulating division-level strategies. Instead, CEOs are seen as guiding a \"bottom-up\" process whereby division managers propose strategies for review and approval by the corporate office. Contrary to this view, we argue that CEOs in global media firms frequently drive strategy in a \"top-down\" manner, especially when their firms seek to expand by integrating the activities of two or more existing divisions. We refer to such firms as \"Entrepreneurial M-forms,\" and maintain that their reliance on an activist CEO offers benefits: (1) in turbulent environments, when the use of slow, bottom-up planning processes risks forfeiting first-mover advantages; and (2) when expansion entails major capital commitments, and division managers may be reluctant to accept the career risks associated with sponsorship of \"bet-the-company\" projects.
Journal Article
Strategy making as iterated processes of resource allocation
Capitalizing on the Bower-Burgelman process model of strategy making in a large, complex organization, we investigate the multilevel managerial activities that lead firms facing similar new business opportunities to respond with different strategic commitments. Our field-based data provide evidence on (1) the role of `corporate contexts' that reflects top managers' crude strategic intent in shaping strategic initiatives of business-unit managers; (2) the critical influence of early business development results on increasing or decreasing middle managers' enthusiasm to the new businesses and top managers' confidence in these middle managers in a resource allocation; (3) the escalation or deescalation of a firm's strategic commitment to the new businesses as a consequence of iterations of resource allocation. We conclude that it is useful to conceptualize strategy making in a large, complex firm as an iterated process of resource allocation.
Journal Article
From Resource Allocation to Strategy
Joseph L. Bower and Clark G. Gilbert have collected together some of the leading experts on strategy to examine how strategy is actually made by company managers across the several levels of an organization. Is strategy a coherent plan conceived at the top by a visionary leader, or is it formed by a series of smaller decisions, not always reflecting what top management has in mind? Often it is by examining how options for using resources are developed and selected, that we can see how a company’s competitive position gets shaped. On the basis of this understanding, we can see better how these processes can be managed. The book’s five sections examine how the resource allocation process works, how the way it works can lead a company into serious problems, how top management can intervene to fix these problem, and where the most recent thinking on these problems is headed. A fifth section contains assessments of this work by thought leaders in the fields of economics, competitive strategy, organizational behavior, and strategic management. The implications for those who study firms are considerable. Activity that is normally thought about in terms of substantive outcomes such as market share and revenue growth, or present value and internal rate of return, is seen to be inextricably related to organizational and administrative questions. The findings presented here should inform the research of economists, strategists, and behavioral scientists. Thoughtful executives and those who consult with them will also find the book provocative. The processes described are complex, but clear enough so that the way toward effective management is apparent. The models developed provide a basis for building the systems and organization necessary for today’s competitive world.
eBook
Modeling the Resource Allocation Process
The very complexity that limited the ability of the disciplines to capture the essential elements of strategic processes would seem to limit the possibility of building a model of the process itself. In fact, a series of questions first asked in Bower’s 1970 study of resource allocation made it possible to present the phenomenon as a set of three basic processes acting over three generic levels of organization influenced by an identified set of forces. Subsequent researchers have used the same conceptual ingredients, and literally dozens of clinical studies have demonstrated the explanatory value of the model. When dealing with complex phenomena such as strategic processes, it is difficult to provide conventional statistical corroboration of a model. The questions are whether a model is complete and informative enough to use as a basis for normative analysis or action and whether there is a better model.
Book Chapter
Business Policy in the 1980s
The subject of business policy is facing an identity crisis. Differing views on what the subject is range from a college course, to a field of research, to a science. Only a portion of the faculty who teach the business-policy course consider policy as their field or have studied policy and its literature in a systematic way. Further, only recently has a business journal devoted to business policy become available. For the 1980s, the concept of corporate strategy should include managerially active governments and unions. The working interface of government and business is a general-management problem; its perspective is strategic, which is within the business-policy field. A research program that recognizes both the multinational problems and the individual strengths of schools must be developed. The optimal solution would be for individual schools to specialize in one or a small group of industries for a period of years.
Journal Article
Strategy Making as an Iterated Process of Resource Allocation
Despite the fact that many well-known discussions of strategy invoke the image that strategy is a course of action consciously deliberated by top management (e.g. Chandler 1962; Andrews 1971) or an analytical exercise undertaken by staff strategists (e.g. Ansoff 1965; Porter 1980), descriptive analysis of the complexity of real organizational phenomena challenges such simplified conceptualization (e.g. Allison 1971). An explicit recognition of inherent organizational complexities, often described as ‘possible goal incongruence’, ‘information asymmetry’, and ‘organizational politics’ (e.g. Barnard 1938; Simon 1945; Cyert and March 1963; Crozier 1964), as well as ‘unpredictable’ and ‘uncontrollable’ environments (e.g. Schumpeter 1934; Nelson and Winter 1982; Thompson 1967; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Miles 1982), has led some strategic management scholars to describe how strategy is actually formed instead of prescribing what it should be. Findings from their empirical studies suggest that strategy is, more or less, emergent from lower levels of organizations (e.g. Mintzberg 1978; Pascale 1984; Mintzberg and Waters 1985), whether through trial-and-error learning (Mintzberg and McHugh 1985), incrementally with logical guidance from the top (Quinn 1980), or such that small changes are often punctuated by a sudden big change in a relatively short period (Miller and Friesen 1984; Tushman and Romanelli 1985; Gersick 1991). From this strategy process perspective, strategy is ‘a pattern in a stream of decisions and actions’ (Mintzberg and McHugh 1985: 161) that are distributed across multiple levels of an organization.
Book Chapter