Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

12-2013

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Industrial Engineering

Degree Program

Industrial Engineering, PhD

Committee Chair

Biles, William E.

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Evans, Gerald W.

Committee Member

Evans, Gerald W.

Committee Member

Bai, Lihui

Committee Member

Riedel, Thomas

Abstract

The rising speed of change in global frameworks drives international companies into a non-stop changing organization with the need of generating optimal revenues under changing conditions. Regarding to the need to be a flexible and competitive organization the value of a vision and a perfectly streamed strategy to this vision becomes a main success factor for global business. The trend for the need of development of a clear and constant strategy is equally rising with the trend of globalization and intercontinental business companies and therefor the business of strategy consulting rises constantly from the late 1990. Most of the strategy consulting companies concentrate their business on consulting companies with strategy and vision ideas and concepts with the focus on the innovation of new products and services to conquer new markets or to optimize their organizations and processes. The main focus is to provide a strategy concept with respect to cross knowledge of other industries and a set of standardized consulting methods out of their own experience or provided by research departments connected to business universities and institutes. The topic of how this strategy concept is linked to the operation business of the company is nearly never presented by these strategy consulting companies. So the result of the consulting projects is a well-defined and worked-out strategy concept, proven by the leader board but without any concept, set of methods or any approach how to realize the ideas of the concept in the “real world”. Prof. Kaplan realized this lack in the business world and provided several research papers and extended books to support companies with solutions solving this problem. Especially his latest work “The execution premium” concentrates his research on the topic how to link worked-out strategies to operations for competitive advantages. The first aim of the dissertation is to review and analyze the theories from Prof. Kaplan, focusing on “the execution premium”. As the second aim the dissertation will document the execution of his provided concepts and methods in a “real-life” experiment followed by a gap analysis of the experiment with respect to Kaplan´s theories. Finally the heart of the dissertation will be the development of a best-practice approach to fill up selected gaps and provide a general and integrated approach including a seamless-linked method tool kit for the realization of strategies in companies focusing on the field of executing the strategic initiatives.

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