About Me
I am Hans Strikwerda,
Management Consultant (CMC) and Professor of Organization and Change (internal governance) at the Amsterdam Business School of the University of Amsterdam.
My fields of expertise
Business Administration for the 21st Century.
Today the theory-in-use of many firms and executives still is the dogma of business administration as coined in the first quarter of the twentieth century, by the great organizers such as Fayol, Dupont, Barnard and Sloan. This dogma no longer applies in the informational economy of the 12st century. But in this era we lack the entrepreneurial great organizers to codify a new business administration. Happily a number of executives have found a sensible and clever way for leadership and organization to cater the modern creative knowledge worker. That is what my consultancy is about.
Meta-change.
The familiar management of change, dating from the sixties of the twentieth century and based on punctuated equilibrium, no longer applies. Today leading firms design their organization for change. But also, change now applies to the functions itself, especially their interrelatedness and integration, which requires integrative thinking and thinkers. Change today is not about new organization forms, but it is about the organization of information (but information as defined in cybernetics), the factoring of decision making, including defining objective functions, and it is about designing a proper systemic context to facilitate the behaviors both the firm and its workers are happy with. Cases exist, I use them in my course The Executive Process, I teach at the Amsterdam Business School of the UvA. Also available for in-company courses.
Internal governance.
Corporate strategy, grand strategy, assessment of environmental developments, developing new economic models, new business models, implementation of strategic change, post-merger execution.
Organization (re)design and changes processes at governance level and the level of business models, management processes, accountability, allocating decision rights, coordination mechanisms (self-coordiation, imposed coordination).
Corporate strategy.
The field of corporate strategy / strategic management is in need to redefine itself. What we used to label strategy appears to be from a perspective of corporate finance and active shareholders simply tactics and economizing. Usefull, but today corporate strategy is about grand strategy, about power play in the market. So I have moved into that field
Management consultancy as a profession.
Issues, institutional changes, intellectual challenges, the contribution of the profession to the development of society (member of the OOA, certified management consultant).
My methods of engagement:
- Consultancy (through trasfer of new insights, co-development)
- Workshops/seminars
- (key note) speaker
- In-house courses, mmodules for executive courses, for management development programs
- (multi-)client studies
- Reviews/analysis/monitoring of design processes, change processes, decision making, implementation
Courses I teach
- In the international MBA of the Universiteit van Amsterdam:
- The Executive Process (based on the CCMO-course at Harvard Business School) see course syllabus
- Governance, administration and the organization of hospitals
- In the post-doctoral course for controllers (EMFC):
- Corporate Governance, Internal Governance (organization design, resource allocation, how to organize for uncertainty, management of change, the role of culture, styles of leadership)
- In the post-doctoral course for internal auditors (EMIA):
- Internal Governance (see EMFC, in this case with an emphasis on behavioral aspects and how to audit the system of internal governance and what goes with it)
In the Master for Business Studies:
Management Consulting, from solution peddling to conceptual innovation, that is management consulting for the 21st century.
Strategy Execution, from Bower’s widely applied bottom-up resource allocation process, but which fails to serve the 21st century firm, to the new management control system proposed by Kaplan & Norton, but which needs quite some additions, especially with respect to behavioral aspects.