BUS 374 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Arianism, Business Intelligence, Cost Leadership

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Business Administration
• Course: BUS 374
• Professor: Tim Hargrave

Document Summary

Machine, bureaucracy: open systems approach, the right way to organize is a function of the organization"s environment, organism, humanistic approach. Strategy: goal directed actions to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Customer-oriented missions vs. product-oriented missions: need strategic commitment to missions to succeed. Competitive advantage occurs when competencies are: (today is a product of yesterday), causal ambiguity (determine the. Path dependent resource"s value, rarity, imitability and if it is substitutable), social complexity (# parts, # relationships between parts) Integration strategy = both, focus on quality, innovation, Structure: formal system of tasks and reporting relationships. Types of organizational structures: *structure must be aligned with everything else. Functional, divisional, geographical, matrix, horizontal, virtual network, hybrid. Organizational structure must fit best with the environmental uncertainty, to enable adaptation. Structural approaches to adapting to uncertainty: adding positions and departments, boundary-spanning people in a system who link organizations internal networks w/ outside info.