This volume is part of an ongoing partnership between the Research in Management Consulting book series and the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR), located in Ecully, France, on the outskirts of Lyon. The socio-economic approach to management (SEAM) provides a pathway to creating more engaged, more responsible and responsive, and more productive organizations. In many respects this volume reflects a culmination of ISEOR’s work, drawing together Henri Savall and Veronique Zardet’s insights and framing them in the context of strategy creation and, just as if not more important, strategy implementation. This volume casts SEAM in the context of strategy development and implementation. Reflecting on the changing nature of work and the workplace, the potential power of—and need to develop and build on—human potential has never been greater. Savall and Zardet have always thought that the Western concept of human resources was misguided, that people are not a resource to use up but rather a source of potential to invest in, develop, and nurture. People bring their potential to the organizations in which they work—and it is their choice as to whether they will apply it in their jobs. Thus, a core managerial challenge is to create an environment in which that potential can be maximized. SEAM-based strategy builds on this premise, developing an approach to economic and social performance, providing direction as to how managers can create and implement strategies that enhance organizational effectiveness and efficiency. As Savall and Zardet argue, strategic vision does not have to be limited by constraints in the external environment—companies “are not compelled to enter in a ‘strategic’ tunnel” that mimics the competition and the market. Instead, companies can experience breakthroughs, turning constraints into opportunities by unleashing their internal energy, power, and cohesion, working and succeeding as a team. The SEAM approach to strategy is grounded in innovation and creation far more than imitation—and, as convincingly illustrated in the volume, that creativity can be self-financed through the value-added created by the elimination of organizational dysfunctions and the hidden costs they generate. The volume provides an insightful guide for enhancing economic and social performance, with a useful mixture of specific tools and techniques—grounded in a conceptual view of organizational life—interspersed throughout that illustrate how it can be done.

This book is the 20th volume in the Research in Management Consulting series and the sixth major collaboration with Henri Savall, Véronique Zardet, and their team of intervenerresearchers from the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR) in LyonÉcully, France. In 2013, for the first time, ISEOR co-sponsored a conference on its Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM) paradigm and methodology in the United States. The volume captures the ideas, applications, and exchanges of that meeting hosted by the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The book attempts to bring the reader into the conference itself. The different chapters include the contributors’ presentations (“Chapter Prologue: Conference Remarks”), revised conference papers, and the question and answer dialogue for the session. For those interested in delving further into the SEAM approach, the volume also contains a general bibliography on the development, critique, and application of the framework.

This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. Who will wear the shoes is a question long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to recount narratives in a variety of ways so that the precepts of entrepreneurial storytelling can be made accessible to a variety of audiences — academic, practitioner, student, and community member. Entrepreneurship has a long history and tradition but there are disputed ways of doing business storytelling in entrepreneurship that the next four volumes articulate.Volume 2 provides insights into stories fostering the idea of business (and not necessarily business itself). It focuses specifically on history — contributing to the current debates within management and organizational history around the idea of 'the historic turn'. It reflects on the idea of business and beyond; could there be more to history and business storytelling than what has previously been accepted in the field? This book sets out to explore a diverse array of alternative modes and multiple ways of storying organizations. The editors intentionally sought to involve an international network of authors with diverse storytelling accounts of history as a way of helping build out this new storytelling paradigm in a diverse and inclusive ethic. As a result, this volume showcases a broad spectrum of critical storytelling from geographically diverse authors working in universities, small businesses, and public service throughout Brazil, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To reflect these dynamics, and for the stories in this volume to fit together, chapters were organized into three themes: stories of processing history, tales of history-as-method, and narratives of history through a business opportunity.Volume 3 features stories that reflect the exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, and income across the world. These inequalities and power relations remain continuously con-tested, particularly in these trying times, despite being captive to a particular economic ideology built on the premise of exploitation and subjugation. The stories told in this volume tell against the orthodoxy, the colonizer, and the (seemingly) powerful. They are organized as stories of resistance, emancipation, and transformation. They invite us to rethink the multiple ways to (re)structure power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and open up spaces for the marginalized underprivileged voices.Volume 4 is designed to create a new business storytelling paradigm that critically approaches business narratives that have historically privileged a corporate agenda. It explores the various ways that images of the other in business are developed, presented, and accounted for through powerful and dominant narratives. The stories in this volume, collectively, help readers to understand, resist, and provide strategies for change through various analyses of how business narratives come to develop, get written, are legitimized, are challenged, and get changed over time.Volume 5 brings together the practices specific to the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM). SEAM is a method of change management developed through research interventions carried out in more than 2,000 companies and organizations since 1975. This method is systemic, it considers the whole company, and tends to simultaneously increase social and economic performance by focusing mainly on the development of human skills and behaviors, making it possible to reduce dysfunctions and recycle hidden costs into added value.

In the current crisis context, capitalism is questioned by its detractors or defended by its partisans. The concept of Socially Responsible Capitalism (SRC) is based on the entrepreneurial spirit. It encourages exemplary behaviors, such as effective, efficient and ethical behaviors, by stimulating social responsibility of companies and organizations. This is combined with the development of economic empowerment and legitimate efforts of each citizen-actor. Socially Responsible Capitalism and Management does not confuse financial capitalism and entrepreneurial capitalism. The first one improves the creation of artificial value which leads to financial bubbles that periodically burst and bankrupt the real economy. Quite the reverse, entrepreneurial capitalism creates both solid economic value and employment. This is justified by the production of goods and services that meet legitimate needs of consumer-citizens. This book shows that by putting Human Beings at the heart of action enables producing sustainable economic value, and anthropological values which are inseparable. The innovative aspect of this book lies in its analysis starting from the macro-economic level to the individual one, by presenting a detailed analysis of the micro-economic level of companies within its managerial issues. Socially Responsible Capitalism and Management is dedicated to present the different aspects of SRC for the Society, companies and organizations and also individual actors, as citizens, producers and consumers.

The result of half a century of research and experimentation in economics and management, this Treatise is intended for management practitioners. Socio-economic management (SEAM) makes the demands of humanism in professional life and sustainable economic prosperity compatible. It is illustrated with numerous cases from 2,150 companies and organizations from a wide variety of sectors and presents observed and measured results. Most of these chapters are written jointly by managers or executives of companies and organizations, and scholars or consultants involved in the pilot actions. This book is the work of 193 authors, from 16 countries and 4 continents, practitioners or academics in management sciences and management. This reflects the diversity of national and sectoral contexts of SEAM applications. Some chapters situate this concept in relation to the major currents of current thought. Each chapter is preceded by abstracts in French, English and Spanish. The prefaces, signed by Herman Aguinis and Rene Ricol, show the scope of socio-economic theory and management beyond the borders of the company. The book illustrates the international influence (48 countries) of the innovative and robust methods created and developed by the ISEOR team. Socio-economic theory constitutes a "breakthrough innovation", both in terms of its conceptual contribution and the practical methods and tools of its applications. This holistic approach touches on the different functions of the company and its multiple problems. It provides a structured change management method, focused on stimulating Human Potential and on self-financing the development of the company or organization, through the periodic recycling of hidden costs.

This volume is a first for the Research in Management Consulting series. As research and theory building in management consulting have grown rapidly during the past several years, the series is dedicated to capturing the latest thinking from applied scholars and scholarly practitioners in this field. Complexity and uncertainty in today’s fast-paced business world have prompted a growing number of organizations—profit and not-for-profit alike—to seek guidance in their concomitant change efforts. External and internal consultants and change agents have become increasingly visible in most, if not all, organizational change initiatives. Individual consultants and consulting firms have become increasingly involved in not only providing organizational clients with advice and new ideas but in implementing those ideas and solutions as well. While the series will continue to seek out and explore emerging trends, innovative perspectives, and new insights into the world of management consulting, it is also useful to look back— especially in different countries and cultures—to recapture and revisit past frameworks, intervention models and contributions. This volume is a translation and modest updating of Henri Savall and Véronique Zardet’s original work on mastering “hidden costs,” initially published in French in 1987.

The volume begins with a chapter by Henri Savall, founder and director of the ISEOR Institute and creator of the SEAM methodology, that presents an overview of the development of the socio-economic approach to management, and its guiding frameworks and methodology. The chapter s detailed explanation of the underlying thinking, tools, and techniques of socio-economic management serves as the primer for the remainder of the volume. The book is then divided into three sections. The first part presents illustrations of SEAM interventions in different types of organizations, including industrial and service companies, and not-for-profit organizations, including cultural institutions and sports clubs. The next section looks at cross-cultural applications and assessments of SEAM experiments in Africa, Asia, Mexico, and the United States, with a concluding chapter on intervening in multinational corporations in general. The volume concludes with a section that examines different issues and challenges in SEAM intervention, ranging from the impact on and role of middle managers in the SEAM process, intervening in small organizations, SEAM s facilitative role in operationalizing and institutionalizing information technology, conceptualizing, and implementing organizational change, facilitating merger and acquisition integration, and the application of socio-economic management in sales and marketing. The book also contains a combined glossary and chapter index that provides a definition of key terms and concepts in the SEAM methodology and where they appear in the volume. These key terms are highlighted in bold italics throughout the volume, illustrating their application in different contexts.