How Firms Really Work: A Social Sciences Perspective

To perform effectively in any leadership position in a firm you need to first understand how firms actually work. This book, built on three decades of thinking, researching, and engaging with practitioners, sets out an integrated social science perspective that takes as its starting point that all firms are complex open systems.

How Firms Really Work explores a wide range of topics related to:

• The firm’s value system, transformation risk and the role of knowhow in the value creation process
• The firm’s lifecycle including co-evolution of firms and markets
• Managing hybrid configurations
• The impact of technology on value creation and value capture

With its extensive use of figures and case examples to illustrate its points, this book offers a comprehensive yet broad perspective on the reality of modern firms. Scholars, researchers, and students will find the bringing together of previously unconnected bodies of knowledge into a coherent account of the birth and development of a firm to be very insightful, while professionals armed with the book’s perspectives will be able to assume leadership positions with more confidence.

Cliff Bowman, BA (Econ), MBA, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management at Cranfield University in the UK. He has been researching, teaching and consulting in the strategy field for over three decades and has published fourteen books, forty refereed journal articles, and presented fifty conference papers. He has held leadership positions in three UK business schools and had non-executive director roles in two academic publishing firms. He co-founded Stratevolve, a strategy consulting firm, with Paul Raspin in 2000. Prior to entering academia Cliff was an economist with the UK Civil Aviation Authority working on airport provision, route licensing and air fare regulation.