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This paper examines how the management control practices of organization members enable the alignment of product development projects with potentially conflicting corporate strategies during the product development process.

Using an ethnomethodology informed research approach, we carry out a case study of an innovative New Zealand food company. Case study data included an internal company document, interviews with organization members, and an external market analysis document.

Our case study company had both sales growth and profit growth corporate strategies which have been argued to cause tensions. We found that four management control practices enabled the alignment of product development projects to these strategies. The first management control practice was having the NPD and marketing functions responsible for different corporate strategies. Other management control practices included the involvement of organization members from across multiple functions, the activities they carried out, and the measures used to evaluate project performance during the product development process.

These findings add new insights to the management accounting literature by showing how a combination of management control practices can be used by organization members to align projects with potentially conflicting corporate strategies during the product development process.

While the alignment of product development projects to corporate strategy is not easy this study shows how it can be enabled through a number of management control practices.

We contribute to the management accounting research in this area by extending our understanding of the management control practices used during the product development process.

Very few functions seem as well‐positioned as the corporate strategy function to create value. Even the name, corporate strategy, suggests access to critical information and decision‐makers, as well as distinctive contributions to the organization's most important decisions. Yet many corporate strategy functions find that their contributions are limited and they are unable to have significant, tangible impact. Understanding the opportunities to increase the value of the corporate strategy function allows managers and executives to make purposeful change to tune the function to the organization's needs.

The authors interviewed managers and executives responsible for the corporate strategy function in 11 different companies across multiple industries. These interviews identified several approaches to providing the corporate strategy function, the keys to their success, and their limitations. A simple matrix was developed that allows the corporate strategy function to be characterized and identifies opportunities to increase the impact of the function.

The authors found that increasing the impact of the corporate strategy function involves increasing the complexity of the function's contribution (e.g., from simple analysis to solution design) or increasing the scope of that contribution (e.g., from process support to solution implementation). Increasing complexity or scope requires changes to the function's organization, processes and people competencies.

Increasing the impact of the corporate strategy function has clear implications – better decisions are made, important initiatives are more likely to succeed, and the strategy function is better able to meet the organization's unique needs.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

Storytelling is claimed to be an effective way of communicating corporate strategy within organisations. However, previous studies have tended to focus holistically on storytelling in organisations rather than investigating how different groups may use and be influenced by stories. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps in the literature by investigating how storytelling in internal communication can either support or subvert corporate strategy.

A qualitative study was conducted into storytelling in two large companies in the UK energy industry. Data were collected through 70 semi-structured interviews, documentary research, and observation research. Impression management theory was used to analyse how stories supported or subverted corporate strategy.

Storytelling by employees in the corporate and customer service areas of the organisations showed the greatest support for corporate strategy. There was more subversive storytelling in the operational areas, particularly by lower level employees. Stories subverted corporate strategy by recounting incidents and encouraging behaviour that contradicted the organisation’s vision/goals and values.

The study shows the important contribution of employees to the collective sensemaking process in organisations, by narrating supportive or subversive stories. Engaging employees in storytelling can enhance support for corporate strategy, however, managers should also see subversive stories as an opportunity to identify and address problems in the organisation.

Purpose – Libraries have been experiencing relentless change and uncertainty in their environment. The literature on corporate communications, strategic management and planning, marketing and public relations more recently, has been recommending using communications as a strategy to coherently and proactively handle and foresee change. Planning and using an overall communications strategy will bring integrity and adherence to the library's goals and direction while reducing the discomfort of change. This selected bibliography is a quick starting point for understanding the significance of an overall communication strategy and its use for managing conflicts and changes in the library's environment strategically. Design/methodology/approach – This article covers books and articles from mid‐1980s to 2004, published around the world. The sources are listed alphabetically by author and then chronologically for different sources by the same author, providing brief but useful information about the content covered for each source. Findings – This bibliography illustrates a variety of research from corporate communications, strategic planning, communications management, marketing and public relations literature that emphasize the role of communication in strategic management. Research limitations/implications – It records a comprehensive list of publications covering international perspectives as well as publications about communication strategy. Practical implications – This selected bibliography is primarily intended for librarians, library planners, managers or administrators, but is also relevant to corporate and business professionals, planners and administrators. Further, it would also be a useful resource for students, faculty and researchers of communication. Originality/value – This bibliography presents a much needed resource list for gathering insights into the strategic role of communication for organizations such as the library that are in a state of constant change.

The aim of this chapter is to focus on the role human capital, innovative recruitment practices and cross-cultural staffing policies have on organizational performance. This facilitates a better understanding about how entrepreneurial thinking is encompassed into an organizational context by utilizing global talent management practices.

The chapter discusses the linkage between global talent management and corporate entrepreneurship literature by providing a number of research propositions.

The chapter highlights how it is important for entrepreneurial organizations to focus on global talent management for their global competitiveness.

This conceptual paper is based on corporate entrepreneurship as the underlying theoretical framework for global talent management, which means the results should be interpreted from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Global talent management is becoming increasingly popular as a way to integrate organizations corporate entrepreneurship goals with their strategic objectives.

More organizations are taking a social perspective that encompasses a global mindset for talent management in order to facilitate more entrepreneurial thinking.

This chapter stresses the importance placed on hiring and retaining talented individuals who can contribute to innovative and risk taking outcomes in global organizations.

A recent area of academic interest within corporate branding and reputation is the use of storytelling in order to differentiate the corporate brand, however there is little empirical research exploring the contents of corporate stories, and how they are used by organisations to build the corporate brand. This paper aims to utilise impression management theory to bring insight into the potential role of corporate stories in shaping the corporate brand.

Corporate stories were identified from the web sites of 99 organisations in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, and content analysis conducted on the stories, using a deductive approach to identify the story elements present in the stories.

There are wide variations in the inclusion of different elements in the stories, indicating that organisations place greater importance on the inclusion of some elements in their corporate stories than others.

The paper highlights the point that while organisations are using corporate stories, they are not sufficiently leveraging them to build their corporate brand. There is a gap between storytelling theory and practice, in that the literature emphasises the importance of including benefits for stakeholders, emotion, and aspects of the corporate strategy in stories, whereas organisations frequently neglect these aspects and instead focus mainly on their accomplishments.

This study has found impression management theory to be a useful perspective on exploring corporate storytelling, and identifies links between the elements of stories and impression management strategies and behaviours. This indicates that the corporate story could influence the impressions that audiences form of the organisation and therefore build the corporate brand.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how organisations use a corporate real estate strategy to support their competitive strategy. It provides a theoretical and empirical overview and analysis of effective combinations of firms' real estate and competitive strategies.

The paper constructs a model that integrates three real estate strategies and three types of competitive strategies. Case studies in ten multinational firms in The Netherlands apply the model, and describe and analyse the combinations of the firms' real estate – and competitive strategies.

A standardisation real estate strategy supports all three competitive strategies: lowest costs, differentiation, and focus. A value‐based real estate strategy supports a competitive strategy of differentiation and differentiation‐focus, and does not contribute to a competitive strategy of lowest costs, or lowest costs‐focus. Finally, an incremental real estate strategy is ambiguous, and does not support any of the three competitive strategies.

The paper constructs a literature‐based model that combines real estate strategy and competitive strategy. It applies the model in a study of ten cases. Practitioners can use the model to analyse and reconsider the combination of their organisation's real estate strategy and competitive strategy. Academics can use the qualitative research results to design further research that qualifies and quantifies the relationship between various elements of real estate – and competitive strategy.

Many organizations have implemented various types of initiatives within the last few decades in an effort to deal with diversity. A possible missing vinculum (link) between how an organization deals with diversity and its impact on the bottomline is a corporate diversity strategy that is executed using a planned change approach to systemically manage diversity. While many organizations have implemented a corporate diversity strategy, most have not used a “planned change‐corporate diversity strategy”. The lack of a “planned change‐corporate diversity strategy” is quite likely to inhibit managing diversity from becoming systemic to an organization's culture and its way of doing business, thus tending to disallow the potential benefits of diversity to be maximized. Hence, this paper offers a framework for using a “planned change‐corporate diversity strategy” to: progress along the “diversity continuum” starting with acknowledging to valuing, and ultimately to managing diversity; and systemically managing diversity using a eight‐step “managing diversity process”.

The paper aims to contribute to the empirically scarce literature on corporate real estate management (CREM) strategies by providing meaningful insights on the different strategies likely to contribute to business performance in a developing country like Nigeria.

Primary data collected using questionnaire administered on property managers of the 105 business organisations in the list of registered companies with the Nigerian Stock Exchange were used for the study. The questionnaire elicited information on the real estate holding pattern and the adopted strategies for acquiring and managing real estate assets. The data collected were analysed using percentages, mean and proportion method.

The study established that 41 per cent of the organisations were public organisations. Others were private companies (31 per cent), government departments (18 per cent) and multi-nationals (10 per cent). The result indicated that 31.8 per cent had no CREM strategy. Strategies used were: cost reduction (18.75 per cent), facilitate production (20.17 per cent), flexibility (15.5 per cent), promote human resource objectives (10.86 per cent), promote the marketing message (4.33 per cent), promote sales and selling delivery (18.67 per cent), facilitate managerial process and knowledge (7.5 per cent) and capture real estate value (6.5 per cent). The study concluded that CREM is a useful tool that the organisations can make effective use of to improve their performance.

Limiting the scope of the study to the perception of the respondents could reflect an element of bias and might pose a great challenge to the representativeness. Also, the use of closed question questionnaire may limit the validity of the results.

The study has major implications on business performance in Nigeria. There is the need for corporations to reappraise their real estate strategy and realign it with their corporate objective. There is also the need for Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers to train its members for contemporary business requirements.

The paper is a useful guide to corporate real estate managers in developing countries towards using real estate strategies to minimize the overall cost of their companies.