The necessary nature of future firms : attributes of survivors in a changing world / George P. Huber.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-288) and indexes.

Dangerous deficiencies -- What is happening? -- What is not? -- The role of top management -- About this book -- The future environments of business organizations -- Scientific knowledge and improved technology -- Scientific knowledge -- Improved technologies -- Mental blocks to imagining a different world on the same planet -- Interim summary and transition -- The complexity of future environments -- Environmental variety -- Environmental density and interdependence -- Interim summary and transition -- Environmental dynamism and competitiveness -- Velocity, turbulence, and instability -- Environmental competitiveness -- Summary and transition -- Sensing and interpreting the environment -- Facit AB -- Importance of environmental sensing and interpretation -- Consequences and importance of interpretation -- Environmental sensing in future firms -- Intelligence gathering -- Intelligence gathering as a staff function? as an outsourced function? -- Intelligence gathering as specialized accountability -- Intelligence gathering as eclectic responsibility -- Supporting sensors -- Probing the environment -- Sensing early responses to the firm's actions and products -- Top managers as environmental sensors -- Interim summary and transition -- Interpreting what is sensed -- Declines in quality and timeliness of organizational interpretations -- Enhancing interpretation in future firms -- Faulty interpretations -- Summary and transition -- Organizational decision making -- Decisions and decision making resource in future firms -- Increasing environmental dynamism and its consequences -- Increasing environmental complexity and its consequences -- Increasing competitiveness and its consequences -- Decision maker capabilities: past, present, future -- Interim summary and transition -- Decision making practices in future firms -- Ensuring scope -- Ensuring speed -- Effects of forthcoming information technologies on decision speed and scope -- IT investments focused on analysis -- IT investments focused on communication -- Interim summary and transition -- Tempting practices -- Intuitive decision making -- Satisficing and analogizing -- Firms' responses to personal propensities to use short-cut methods -- Summary and transition -- Knowledge acquisition: organizational learning -- Learning, knowledge, and innovation -- Organizational learning: a practice whose time has come -- Learning from experience -- Highly effective learning experiences: designed experiments -- Highly effective learning experiences: natural experiments -- Highly effective learning experiences: learning from action probes and operations -- Highly effective learning experiences: learning by observing samples of one or fewer -- Learning from others-vicarious learning -- Absorptive capacity -- Importing knowledge in the form of expertise -- Enhancing organizational learning by enhancing individual learning -- Introducing learning practices -- Summary and transition -- Leveraging learning through knowledge management -- Sematech -- The four repositories of organizational knowledge -- The need to manage knowledge -- Direct, informal knowledge sharing -- An example of how motivation can negatively affect direct, informal knowledge sharing -- Organizational culture: an achievable solution to the problem of motivation? -- Structural approaches for facilitating direct, informal knowledge sharing -- Interim summary and transition -- Knowledge management systems -- Motivational issues in knowledge management systems -- Managing motivation in knowledge management systems -- Situational influences favoring the use of extrinsic motivators -- Long-lived traditions and cultures -- Increased use of teams, and of ince.