It is often claimed that 50 to 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail. Although these claims have had a significant impact on management theory and practice, they are controversial. We aim to clarify why this is the case. Towards this end, an extensive review of the literature is presented, assessed, compared and discussed. We conclude that whilst it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of a new strategy can be a difficult task, the true rate of implementation failure remains to be determined. Most of the estimates presented in the literature are based on evidence that is outdated, fragmentary, fragile, or just absent. Careful consideration is advised before using current estimates to justify changes in the theory and practice. A set of guiding principles is presented for assisting researchers to produce better estimates of the rates of failure.
Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to assess to what extent the loss of the ISO 9001 certification affects the decertified firms' financial performance.Design/methodology/approach -Using standard event-study methods, this paper matches a sample of 143 Portuguese companies that lost their ISO 9001 certification with similar nonevent counterpart firms (according to return-on-assets and size) and compares the performance of these two groups of firms using financial data collected from the AMADEUS database.Findings -Results show no statistical significant differences in the financial performance (as measured by return-on-assets, return-on-sales, and sales growth) between companies that lost their ISO 9001 certification and their matched firms. Although the literature suggests that certification improves firms' performance and that the benefits of certification may last over long periods of time, this paper's results suggest that, after decertification, companies do not exhibit over or underperformance in their operations vis-à-vis comparable firms that do not undergo the same event.Originality/value -As far as the authors are aware, this is the first study assessing the impact of ISO 9001 certificate withdrawal on the decertified firms' financial performance.
Purpose-The paper addresses the following question: How do strategy implementation obstacles relate to each other and affect strategy implementation? Method-The research methodology is qualitative and based on an extensive review of the literature and on an in-depth case study analysis. Findings-This paper draws two main conclusions. The first is that the many obstacles that impact the strategy implementation process can interact and be strongly interrelated in dynamic and complex manners. The second is that obstacles can lead to and reinforce other obstacles, eventually forming long chains of blockages. Originality-Strategy implementation remains a difficult task with improbable success. This paper provides a contribution to an explanation on why so many strategy implementation efforts fail. It is one of the very few papers addressing the issue of the relationships between strategy implementation obstacles.
More than one million certified companies must choose, every three years, whether to renew or to withdraw from ISO 9001 certification. This paper investigates whether ISO 9001 decertification decision is driven by economic motivations. Using standard event-study methods, the paper looks into this question by comparing the abnormal performance of a sample of Portuguese firms that lose their certification with that of similar, non-event, firms. The paper finds no statistically significant differences in the economic performance of these two sets of firms in their post-ISO certification period. Such evidence suggests that economic underperformance is not the reason why companies are ISO-decertifying and further suggests that the decision to decertify is economically irrelevant. The study advances possible explanations for this (ir)relevancy and puts forwards implications for theory and for the ISO 9001 governance system. The governance system must change in order to increase the economic benefits that organizations can expect to gain from ISO (re)certification. This is the first study assessing the impact of ISO 9001 certification on firms that subsequently lost the certificate.
This paper aims to assess whether TQM is harder to implement than other business strategies. In order to accomplish this objective we have adopted a two-stage methodology.Firstly, we carried out an extensive review of the literature to identify the rates of TQM implementation failure estimated by researchers and practitioners. Secondly, we compared these rates with those estimated for other organisation-wide transformational efforts and explored the extent to which the obstacles to TQM implementation and to the implementation of other business strategies differ. Based on the literature reviewed and on the comparative analyses performed, we conclude that whilst it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of TQM can be a difficult task, significant uncertainty remains as to what the exact rate of failure is. Furthermore, the analyses suggest that the rates of failure and obstacles to TQM implementation are similar to those presented by other business strategies, and therefore, there seems to be no grounds to assume that TQM is more difficult to implement than other business strategies. These findings have implications for researchers and practitioners and open up several avenues for further research, which are also discussed in this paper.
This article addresses the problem of service quality strategy implementation and proposes three interrelated models: a static model of the organisation; a comprehensive dynamic model of the implementation process, both synthesised from the literature; and a mixed model, which integrates static and dynamic models. The mixed model is combined with the service quality gaps (SQGs) model, drawn at a previous congress paper, to propose a map of the pattern of SQGs occurring at each implementation stage; the organisational variables that can be manipulated to eliminate SQGs; and several implications to practising managers. IntroductionThis article addresses the problem of service quality strategy implementation and proposes three interrelated models of strategy implementation, with theoretic and managerial implications. The main reasons for addressing this problem and developing those models can be briefly stated as follows. First, services constitute the largest sector of the world economy (Bateson, 1995) and its importance seems to be growing. Second, quality strategy is clearly an important differentiation strategy, both for service and manufacturing industries. Third, strategy literature, in general, lacks implementation models (Mockler, 1995), and quality gurus, in particular, have abdicated responsibility for delineating comprehensive and coherent patterns of implementation (Morris & Haigh, 1996). Fourth, the failure rate of TQM implementation is, in practice, very high and estimated in the vicinity of 80% (Voss & O'Brien, 1992). These reasons are strong enough to motivate research in the area of strategy implementation and, particularly, in the field of service quality strategy implementation.
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