The Key to Business Success – By Phin Upham

By Phin Upham

How does an organization achieve a “sustainable competitive advantage?” When it comes to organizational theory, there are many views which attempt to explain why some organizations are superior to others or have a source of advantage over other firms. One of these views is the dynamic capabilities theory. The capabilities view tries to describe the various accomplishments, disasters, and sources of trouble that the business world endures. This view has an added value: it is especially applicable during times of change. But this additional complexity is occasionally exaggerated by the writers of papers on this subject. Although it is crucial, an organization with good capabilities and a relatively firm foundation is able to produce a great deal of relevant competitive advantage. The theory, which includes the “learning to learn” portion of the picture, as long as it surpasses normal company learning, is a marginal development.

Authors Nelson and Winter write about the capabilities point of view in their essay (1982) “Organizational Capabilities Behavior.” Starting with a focus on the individual, the authors suggest that skilled behavior in individuals is produced through routine, past behavior/learning, and tactic knowledge. The paper doesn’t emphasis some of the conventions of classical micro-economics such as firms optimize, entrepreneurs are identical, and inputs are homogenous. Instead, the authors state that choices in companies might not be ideal – they might be the outcome of personal experience or organizational memory. Organizational memory is found in the situation itself, an individual’s organizational and personal experience, and external memory. Generalizing from this individual standpoint, the authors apply evolutionary economics to the level of the organization. The concept is constructed from the micro level to the macro, producing a conceptual parallel between the two, and a causal link between the nature and behavior of the capabilities of an organization and the behavior of individuals.

Creating an image of organizational routines, the authors end up revealing truces between individual and organizational motivations. Organizational routines give way to organizational capabilities. This theory sets the foundation of the capabilities theory and also produces some fascinating consequences. The first consequence is that organizational capabilities don’t like changes, including changes designed for improvement. The second consequence produced by this theory is that organizational capabilities are nearly impossible to replicate by other firms.

The Space of Love and Garbage by Phin Upham

By Phin Upham

“The Space of Love and Garbage,” is a book that I worked on which collects for the first time in one place twenty of the most outstanding works from the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Some of the contributing authors include Arthur M. Meltzer, Stephen A. Erickson, Peter Berkowitz, and Jonathan Baron.

Focusing on personal, emotional and political issues, these pieces illuminate just those areas of philosophy and life that are most important to living ‘the good life’ to its fullest as an individual and as a citizen.

What are our responsibilities to each other, to the ones we love, to our society, to our country? In this book we bring philosophy back to its roots— asking questions that are both important and instructive to the general public, lovers, philosophers, and scholars.

We at the Harvard Review of Philosophy believe philosophy to be a vibrant and exciting way to address some of the most pressing and deepest concerns in life. The pieces pull from analytic, continental and ancient philosophical roots, and they address a variety of topics ranging from immigration to moral intuition, but they never stray from what we feel are philosophy’s central questions. Each chapter focuses on questions central to practical and normative questions of the human experience—primarily those involving life, love and politics.

This book is a companion volume to “All We Need Is a Paradigm: Essays on Science, Economics, and Logic,” — another collection of essays from The Harvard Review of Philosophy, that I edited while an undergraduate philosophy student at Harvard.
This book is available on Amazon.com and on eBay

Explaining CEO Longevity

By Phin Upham

What happens when a CEO stays in power for more than ten years? Are they respected and honored or scrutinized and cast down? In the paper “Political Dynamics and the Circulation of Power: CEO succession in U.S. Industrial Corporations,” 1960-1990, William Ocasio explores important structural factors that impact CEO longevity. He views the topic through the models institutionalization of power and the circulation of power, both of which have a different way of analyzing CEO tenure as well as power accumulation, strategic maneuvering, and effects of time.

The first model, the institutionalization of power, states that a CEO has a better chance of remaining in the same position the longer he or she has had the title. On the other hand, the model of the circulation of power suggests that as time goes by, the longer that a CEO remains in office the more likely that people will grow against the CEO and that his or her ideas will be rejected for being old and stale.

However, viewing CEOs through these models holds a few assumptions. First, there are no personality characteristics in the metrics, so it’s not completely accurate to assume that these models can affect everyone in the same way. This structuralist view also doesn’t include anything about how the CEO left the company or where they went next. For example, a CEO could have left the company voluntarily. However, it’s apparent that the author of this essay is not concerned with the dropout rate, but with the ability of a CEO to remain in power when they want to stay in office. CEOs that leave the company voluntarily should be taken out of the research, yet it can be difficult to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary drop out.

Ocasio’s research demonstrates especially clear logic, and he shows the data in several different formats with short descriptions of the important effects. The results of his research reveal the conclusion that the circulation of power model applies during the first ten years of tenure. However, after the first decade, the scenario shifts and the CEO’s circumstances seem to mirror the situations described by the consolidation of power model.

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