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The SGMM holds that the key point of reference for management is to design and advance organizational value creation. Value creation, so the SGMM, occurs through an organization’s interaction (co-evolution) with its environment – including avoiding unwanted side effects (e.g., stress or environmental burdens). Depending on its history, environmental embeddedness and value creation, an organization requires a very specific management practice to design and advance its organizational value creation.

The SGMM distinguishes two perspectives on organizational value creation: a task perspective and a practice perspective. This distinction pertains to the historical development of business administration, i.e., management science.

The task perspective assumes that an organization’s core – task-centered, labor-division-based human interaction, between individuals with different qualifications, educational and professional backgrounds – quite simply functions. Further, this perspective assumes that organizational value creation and its development can be influenced, unproblematically, from the outside. The founder of German-language business administration, Erich Gutenberg, formulated this idea in his groundbreaking postdoctoral thesis (Gutenberg, 1929: 26; our translation and emphasis):

“Hence, the enterprise as an object of business administration cannot directly be the empirical enterprise. The assumption must be made that the organization of the enterprise functions perfectly. This assumption eliminates the organization as a source of its own problems and removes it from its scientifically and practically significant position to the extent that it can no longer create difficulties for theoretical deliberations.”

Many business models, concepts, and frameworks are dominated by an economic approach to organizations. As such, they emphasize efficiency, i.e., cost-benefit considerations. [30]

From a task perspective, organizations are clearly identifiable entities consisting of tasks and problems capable of being systematically captured analytically and processed rationally. This perspective also suggests that concepts and “instruments,” such as the marketing mix, five-forces analysis or financial ratio analyses, if correctly understood and applied by the responsible employees, contribute to good decisions and thus sustain an organization’s success. Hence, the task perspective relies on the unproblematic possibility of organizations being rationally designable and controllable. The blind spot of this perspective is the demanding preconditions for management to become effective.

However, already Gutenberg realized the shortcomings of this perspective (Gutenberg, 1929: 26; our translation and emphasis):

“Assuming such a perfectly functioning organization, which ensures smoothly executing the basic business processes, does not mean negating, but only neutralizing the organization’s problems. The stance presented here will give rise to a wealth of arguments that privileges research questions about the organization.”

Gutenberg’s demand is addressed by the SGMM’s practice perspective. This second perspective focuses on what the task perspective, by assuming that organizations simply function, largely leaves unmentioned: the complex socio-cultural preconditions and practices of labor-division-based cooperation. Concretely, it is anything but self-evident that communication succeeds, or that timely, robust decisions keep being made and take effect in daily business, or that organizations can innovatively change and develop entrepreneurially. All of this instead requires particular reflective and communicative efforts while carefully heeding complex, ephemeral, confusing, and often elusive organizational events.

The SGMM’s two perspectives view environment, organization, and management in different ways. Consequently, certain descriptive categories appear in both perspectives, sometimes with slightly different meanings – similar to looking at the same object from different angles.

• The task perspective applies an analytical and design process that focuses on facts and contents. This process contributes to elaborating a differentiated sense of the possibilities for successfully advancing existing organizational value creation while accounting for diverse influencing factors and effects. This analytical and design process enables using diverse business concepts and frameworks. [31]

• The practice perspective, on the other hand, helps critically reflect on the manifold resource-related and cultural prerequisites for effectively realizing convincing design options. This enables developing ways of working simultaneously on the necessary preconditions for and means of realizing existing design options, as well-considered and as effectively as possible.

Figure 3: The interplay of the task and practice perspectives (M.C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands” © 2019 The M.C. Escher Company-The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com)

Figure 3 shows that both perspectives are equally important and complementary. Concrete entrepreneurial challenges require using both perspectives systematically. Hence, the SGMM addresses environment, organization, and management from both perspectives and constructively interrelates them. Our long-standing observations in management research, executive education, and management practice unmistakably demonstrate how effective and responsible management practice needs to oscillate between – and productively interconnect – these two perspectives. [32]