Kathleen Eisenhardt (Stanford) to give a talk on strategy formation at ETH
Kathleen Eisenhardt, Professor for Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University will be visiting SusTec at the end of May. We have the pleasure of inviting you to a talk she will give at ETH based on her recent work with Timothy Ott.
Title: Weaving Strategic Decisions: Strategy Formation under Novelty, Resource Constraint and Complexity
When: Tuesday 30th of May, 13.30 to 15.00
Where: ETH Zurich, room to be announced depending on registrations – please register by May 24 Download here
Abstract: Prior research has shown that executives can benefit by forming strategy both through holistic design and incrementally learning through action but that the two processes are often at odds with one another. This study seeks to explore how executives combine holistic and incremental processes to form strategy in novel, complex, and resource constrained environments. Through an in-depth, multiple case study of early stage, two-sided market firms, we develop a theoretical framework to describe how executives create and maintain strategies for growth. We find that executives weave strategic decisions together into a system of activities through two separate but complimentary practices. They use sequential focus to intensely devote resources to learning in a single decision domain at a time while using stepping stones in other domains to move incrementally toward future goals without distracting from their focus. Our results have implications for research on the microfoundations of strategy and organizational theory.
