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Levers of Control
book

Levers of Control

by Robert Simons
November 1994
Intermediate to advanced
232 pages
5h 55m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from Levers of Control

Preface

I began work on this book more than ten years ago with a simple question: How do managers balance innovation and control? Data that I had collected from over one hundred companies revealed a puzzling anomaly: the most innovative companies used their profit planning and control systems more intensively than did their less innovative counterparts. I had expected the opposite result. Existing theory predicted that innovative companies should minimize formal controls to reduce bureaucracy and allow creativity to flourish.

Since then, I have studied scores of highly regarded companies and the control levers their senior managers use. In my teaching at Harvard, I have developed case studies in a variety of industries and have refined concepts ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781422160671