Richard Normann (Finland, 1943 - Paris, November 18, 2003) was a Swedish management consultant and researcher early in the development of theories of service management, interactive strategy, and offerings. [1]
Normann received his MBA and then PhD in Business Economics in 1975 at Lund University, leading to a professorship. He was soon working at management consultancy Scandinavian Institutes of Administrative Research (SIAR) and was its president from 1976 to 1980. He was also a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School and visiting scholar at Harvard Business School. Being the founder of Service Management Group, SMG in 1980, he later also founded the strategy consulting firm NormannPartners [2] that bear his conceptual legacy today.
Normann was the one who in the 1970s introduced the concept of mission. [3] He was, among other things, strategy consultant for SAS when the airline in the 1980s, during Jan Carlzon CEO's time, developing the idea, together with Denis Boyle of "moments of truth" oriented toward business travelers and customers.
Green Templeton College, at Oxford University, honors his memory with the Annual Richard Normann Lecture.
In the introduction to Reframing Business, Henry Mintzberg cites Normann as a "significant scholar", "using the consulting opportunity to advance general scholarship, namely our understanding of how this world works".
Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Management consulting is the practice of providing consulting services to organizations to improve their performance or in any way to assist in achieving organizational objectives. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external advice and accessing consultants' specialized expertise regarding concerns that call for additional oversight.
Gary P. Hamel is an American management consultant. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.
Michael Eugene Porter is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited with creating Porter's five forces analysis, a widely-used management framework. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists. His work has been recognized by governments, non-governmental organizations and universities.
McKinsey & Company is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, McKinsey is the oldest and largest of the "MBB" management consultancies (MBB). The firm mainly focuses on the finances and operations of their clients.
IBM Consulting, rebranded in 2021 from IBM Global Business Services, is the professional services and consulting arm of IBM. It provides services to companies, global government organizations, non-profits and NGOs.
There is no agreed upon definition of value network. A general definition that subsumes the other definitions is that a value network is a network of roles linked by interactions in which economic entities engage in both tangible and intangible exchanges to achieve economic or social good. This definition is similar to one given by Verna Allee.
Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.
The resource-based view (RBV), often referred to as the "resource-based view of the firm", is a managerial framework used to determine the strategic resources a firm can exploit to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
Co-creation, in the context of a business, refers to a product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role from beginning to end. Less specifically, the term is also used for any way in which a business allows consumers to submit ideas, designs or content. This way, the firm will not run out of ideas regarding the design to be created and at the same time, it will further strengthen the business relationship between the firm and its customers. Another meaning is the creation of value by ordinary people, whether for a company or not. The first person to use the "Co-" in "co-creation" as a marketing prefix was Koichi Shimizu, professor of Josai University, in 1979. In 1979, "co-marketing" was introduced at the Japan Society of Commerce's national conference. Everything with "Co" comes from here.
Oliver Wyman, LLC is an American management consulting firm. Founded in New York City in 1984 by former Booz Allen Hamilton partners Alex Oliver and Bill Wyman, the firm has more than 60 offices in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific employing over 5,000 professionals. The firm is part of the Oliver Wyman Group, a business unit of Marsh McLennan.
Boston Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG) is an American global management consulting firm founded in 1963 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the "Big Three" along with McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company. Since 2021, BCG has been led by the German executive Christoph Schweizer.
Monitor Deloitte is the multinational strategy consulting practice of Deloitte Consulting. Monitor Deloitte specializes in providing strategy consultation services to the senior management of major organizations and governments. It helps its clients address a variety of management areas, including: Organic Growth, Strategic Transformation, Innovation and Ventures, Business Design and Configuration, Strategic Sensing, and Insight Services.
L.E.K. Consulting is a global strategy consulting firm based in London and Boston. Founded in 1983 by three partners from Bain & Company, L.E.K. focuses on corporate strategy, marketing and sales, mergers and acquisitions, and operations. It provides expertise to life sciences and pharma, healthcare services, consumer products, financial services, energy and environment, media and entertainment, technology, travel and transport, industrials, and retail. The firm also has a strong private equity practice.
David Ing is a Canadian systems scientist, business architect, management consultant, and marketing scientist. He served as president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (2011-2012).
Scandinavian Institutes for Administrative Research (SIAR) was a Swedish consulting company and research institute founded by the late Professor Eric Rhenman in the mid-1960s. From 1966 to 1971 SIAR was a research institute. During the 1970s the profile was changed, so that it became the leading Swedish consulting company throughout the 1970s with some ten offices around the world. The institute developed a method for organization development, based on a strong theoretical foundation that was inspired by American researchers such as Herbert Simon, Philip Selznick and James D. Thompson.
Howard M. Guttman is an American management consultant and founder of Guttman Development Strategies, a consulting firm. Guttman is best known for his theories on corporate organizational hierarchies, positing that the traditional, top-down model of management is less effective than the horizontal, high-performance organization, where decisions are made by cross-functional teams with equal authority.
Richard Max Burton is an American organizational theorist and Emeritus Professor of Management and Organization at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, known for his work in the field on business strategy and organizational design.
EY-Parthenon is Ernst & Young's global strategy consulting arm. The firm was established as The Parthenon Group LLC in 1991 by former Bain & Company directors William "Bill" Achtmeyer and John C. Rutherford. In 2014 The Parthenon Group merged with professional services firm EY forming the new entity EY-Parthenon. The move was viewed as part of the continued efforts by the Big Four to move up the value chain from their traditional audit services into more lucrative areas of business, as well as to provide new points of entry to clients.