About the model

Management is becoming more and more complex and demanding. In our interconnected world, in which it is becoming ever harder to fully grasp and tackle complexity, effective management relies on highly diverse premises. It is becoming increasingly important to gain a solid understanding of these foundations. For it only on this basis that management practice can be performed in such a way that organizational value creation, in its interplay with an increasing dynamic environment, can continue to be successfully developed.

It is essential for managers to carefully and thoroughly reflect on both organizational value creation and the required management practice. To this end, enabling communication contexts, a differentiated language and an integrative structuring framework are essential. Together, these factors create the preconditions for making tangible the complex challenges faced by today’s management practice and for promoting their joint discussion. This is precisely the purpose that the St. Gallen Management Model has served since its original conceptualization by Hans Ulrich and Walter Krieg (1972).

The SGMM is not simply a collection of conceptual frameworks, but a scientific book in which two complementary perspectives on the interplay of environment, organization, and management are presented as an integrated model. The St. Gallen Management Model (SGMM) is built from the interplay of the task perspective and the practice perspective.

• The task perspective focuses on a business-oriented conceptualization of organizational value creation as a key management task.
• The practice perspective complements the task perspective by illuminating the basic resource-related, cultural, and communicative prerequisites for management to become effective. This book aims to familiarize readers step-by-step with new ways of looking at environment, organization, and management.

In a systemic view, much of what at first seems familiar appears quite different from what we are used to. However, opening up innovative visions of the future and possibilities for action, and making the unquestioned and self-evident accessible to open reflection, requires developing new and thus unfamiliar forms of language and thought.