Abstract
Doctoral thesis on ambition patterns observed in strategic decision-making across organizations.
Excerpt from the journal
This thesis is about designing a methodology to model aspects of strategic decision-making into a generically applicable calculation rule. The model is based on the input from large numbers of employees to support an organization’s upper management. Modelling strategic decision-making can be done, for example, by means of a conceptual model (e.g. Kotter, 1995), with a set of mathematical equations (e.g. Gureckis & Love, 2009) or by using specific visualizations (e.g. Kohl & Miikkulainen, 2009).
When involving the input of large numbers of employees, strategic decisionmaking is mainly a bottom-up flow of information: the employees become the ‘eyes and ears’ of upper management. But, when decisions are made and targets are set, it is the subsequent change management where information flows top-down: upper management instructs the rest of the organization what the targets, milestones, budgets and mandates have become.