The Balanced Company: Organizing for the 21st Century

Controlling the sustainability of production processes and ethical employment of the work force in suppliers' production facilities far away from the home country has resulted in new challenges for managers. They now have to consider how important it is for customers, investors and employees to see that a company is respected in wider society and behaves according to ethical standards. Strategists and Leaders need to make balanced choices about long-term goals and the allocation of resources. They need to analyse, understand and adjust strategies to market, political, value and technology related changes in their environments. Communication specialists need to make balanced decisions which take the different value systems and assumptions of stakeholders into consideration. Change specialists need to balance the need for continuity and change. Managers need to make balanced decisions about whether to achieve goals through control or trust. Human resource specialists need to make balanced decisions about how to design tasks and jobs in order to make them attractive as well as motivating. Marketers need to make balanced decisions about how to market products in the light of what is now important in consumers' and other stakeholder's eyes. Leaders also have to acknowledge that there are times when organizations have to be taken out of balance, since it is necessary to 'unfreeze' existing relationships in organizations during change. Therefore, there are decision and organizing processes involved in both the creation and recreation of balanced relationships.

Chapters in The Balanced Company ask and provide answers to questions about corporately responsible and ethically driven balanced decision making, such as:

• How can a company and its stakeholders identify what should be taken into consideration - What is to be achieved and what should be avoided?
• Through what types of processes are the criteria, conditions and values that are to be realised or taken into consideration constructed and decided upon?
• What characterises the content, differences and complexity of the different types of values and criteria?
• Through what kinds of theoretical and methodological procedures are questions about conflicting and convergent criteria and values decided upon?
• How are criteria and values constructed and dealt with in practice?
• What are the consequences of this for management in practice and for the organising process?