Making peer groups effective: Lessons from BP's experiences

Long Range Planning

Volumn 38, Issue 5, 2005, Pages 429-443

  Goold, Michael ^a  

^a HULT INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

KNOWLEDGE SHARING; MUTUAL LEARNING; PEER GROUPS; SELF MANAGEMENT; TOP MANAGEMENT SUPPORT;

DECISION MAKING; MANAGERS; MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS; PERFORMANCE;

INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT;

CORPORATE STRATEGY;

EID: 27744538517     PISSN: 00246301     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.lrp.2005.06.002     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See Etienne C. Wenger William and M. Synyder Communities of practice: The organizational frontier Harvard Business Revue Jan-Feb 2000 139-145
2. See also Nancy M. Dixon Common Knowledge 2000 Harvard Business School Press
3. Rob Cross Nitin Nohria and Andrew Parker Six myths about informal networks and how to overcome them Sloan Management Review Spring 2002 67-75
4. John Seely Brown and Paul Dugid Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation Organization Science Feb 1991 40-57
5. Sumantra Ghoshal and Lynda Gratton Integrating the enterprise Sloan Management Review Fall 2002 31-38
6. Our views about peer groups are based on research carried out during the period of 2002-2004, including interviews with about a dozen companies including BP. Our research was, however primarily wit hBP, as BP's process seemed unusually interesting and successful.
7. See Steven E. Prokesch Unleashing the power of learning - An interview with British Petroleum's John Browne Harvard Business Review 1997
8. British Petroleum case series Stanford Business School 1998
9. Chris Collinson and Geoff Parcel Learning to Fly 2001 Capstone
10. Morten T. Hansen and Bolko Von Oetinger Introducing T-shaped managers: Knowledge management's next generation Harvard Business Review March 2001 107-116
11. The transformation of BP London Business School 2001 These sources provide detailed descriptions of how BP's peer processes operated. Our main purpose in this article is to assess why the peer groups worked well rather than to describe how they worked.
12. In BP, the four divisions (Exploration and Production or Upstream; Downstream; Petrochemicals; Gas, Power and Renewables) are referred to as Business Segments (previously Business Streams). The divisional Executive Committees are now called Senior Executive Teams (SETs).
13. See, for example, John Seely Brown Minding and mining the periphery Long Range Planning 37 2004 143-151
14. Mitsuru Kodama believes that what he calls 'strategic communities', formed and led from middle management ranks, are the best way to search openly for new strategies in difficult-to-predict environments where there is likely to be a need for a process of search involving trial and error. He discusses NTT DoCoMo as a case example. See Transforming an old economy company through strategic communities Long Range Planning 35 2002 349-365
15. Partner meetings in some professional firms approximate to this mode of operation.
16. There has also been some increased emphasis on regional management for BP's four regions: Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Middle East and Russia.
17. 'Big Hairy Audacious Goals.'
18. For a fuller, more detailed discussion of difficult links of this sort, see Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell Designing Effective Organizations 2002 Jossey-Bass
19. Minutes of House Commons Public Administration Select Committee Hearing, Thursday 28 November, 2002.