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More than 50 years ago, a group of professors and lecturers at the University of St. Gallen (HSG), headed by Hans Ulrich, initiated a fundamental new development of conventional business administration, in order to advance the field toward an integrative management theory (Ulrich, 1984). This scientific endeavor sought to provide both managers and students with an integrative frame of reference within the ongoing disciplinary diversification of business administration. The envisaged frame would enable readers to perceive complex problems in their overall context, and to treat them as holistically as possible. Conceptualizing management as designing, steering, and developing purpose-oriented social institutions (Ulrich, 1984), the framework aimed to counteract attempts to simplify management by aggregating individual disciplines under the primacy of profit maximization.

Ulrich also assumed that management first and foremost means coping with complexity. On this basis, he explored management practice and management science in an unusual and innovative systems-theoretical and cybernetic view (Ulrich, 1968). This approach regards organizations as complex systems having to tackle an equally complex environment. This perspective provided the theoretical basis for developing the St. Gallen Management Model (Ulrich & Krieg, 1972; Malik, 1981; Ulrich, 2001). Ulrich’s first-generation SGMM was intended to help readers adequately grasp and effectively deal with complex management challenges, in their overall context and in their dynamic interconnectedness.

To this day, this concern has lost none of its relevance, as effective management is becoming ever more demanding, more complex, and more controversial. Hence, the latest version of the SGMM, like its predecessors, also seeks to provide a language and a framework to help both managers and students cope with the complexity confronting management practice today.

Today’s fourth-generation SGMM shares a systems-oriented and entrepreneurial focus with the original SGMM (Ulrich & Krieg, 1972). It deepens the second-generation SGMM’s explicit differentiation of management into operational, strategic, and normative aspects (Bleicher, 1991). Along with the third generation (Rüegg-Stürm, 2004), it shows that organizational value creation is achieved through dynamic interaction with a diverse environment and through a sophisticated interplay of processes. The present fourth [33] generation reconceptualizes management as a reflective design practice, which must continuously advance organizational value creation by interacting with a dynamic environment through regular reflective distancing (Rüegg-Stürm & Grand, 2017). We explain various key aspects of the SGMM’s systems-oriented focus below.