Michael Porter regarded the selection of a defendable position within an industry as the end result of a competitive strategic analysis. He argued that successful, profitable companies generally choose to compete on either low costs or by differentiating their products to meet specific customer needs. Although these two strategic options are mutually exclusive,...

Over his lifetime, the academic scholar and Nobel price winner, Herbert Simon, explored the boundaries of human decision making in dynamic environments and contributed significantly to management literature, economics, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. He questioned the assumptions behind the rational decision making process...

Between 1924 and 1933, research teams from Harvard University conducted field studies on worker productivity at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant near Chicago, one of the most advanced manufacturing facilities that employed 29,000 workers to produce telephones and telecommunications equipment for AT&T. The experiments initially...

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...