In 1978, the American academics Miles and Snow developed their strategic choice typology and helped launch the configurational branch of business strategy. Their study brought together the situationalist and the universalist camps who were disputing how companies should compete in a given market. For situationalists, generic strategies were intrinsically...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...

In the late 1950's, the Russian-American engineer, Igor Ansoff, a founder of strategic management, argued that strategic planning was essential for firms operating in a complex, turbulent environment. At that time, sociologists dominated the research on strategic adaptation of non-profit organisations primarily and concluded that ad-hoc management was appropriate...

In the mid 1970's, Marvin Weisbord, an organisational design consultant, created his six boxes model as a diagnostics tool of organisational effectiveness. He identified six key areas in which 'things must go right' and be internally consistent for an organisation to be successful. The result of the diagnosis is a prioritised list of ready to be...