Management strategy and policy frameworks

Social Games Case Study

Management scholar Peter Drucker believes that appropriate decision making is perhaps the fundamental key to success or failure within a modern organization. In fact, he notes that "the skill we need is not long-range planning. It is strategic decision making, or perhaps strategic planning" (Drucker, 2001, p.116). If we combine this idea of decision making at the nth level with innovation, we have the crux of the modern organization. For a modern organization to even hope to survive, however, strategic and innovation decisions must be made in almost every aspect of the business. Decision making success is now measures in minutes rather than days, and requires managers to be more informed and more willing to act (Drucker, 2001).

Over the last decade and the advances in global communication, Internet speeds, and the availability of Smartphones, Laptops, and more memory in computers, online social networks have experienced huge amounts of growth, turning into robust multi-million dollar sites and receiving attention from politicians, marketing professionals of all types, educators and scholars. In fact, MySpace and Facebook, two of the more popular online networks in the United States, account for almost 10% of all Internet usage and have a huge growth of about 200,000 profiles daily (Tancer, 2007). Based on the manner in which Social Networking has changed the manner in which marketers, politicians, and culture views interacting on the Internet, and the changes in behavior engendered by them, these social networks are now critical for the 21st century marketing mind (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). An offshoot of social networking, social games, are far less about graphics and violence and more about connecting with others. "And, because the mainstream was being lured into social gaming, it [became] the fastest growing game market, increasingly popular" globally (Chang and Mendelson, 2010).

Issues surrounding Social Games focus on the ability for the modern organization to be innovative. The complexity of the modern organization has also changed. Simply using the principles of scientific management to improve efficiency is not nearly enough. Too, because the half-life of technology is so short, radical and category breaking innovation is needed not just to compete, but to provide the global environment with positive growth. Peter Drucker believes innovation is the key to sustained growth, but must be radical, not incremental even though everything will not be profitable; being timid is simply not an option. "To start off with the consumer's needs for a significant change is often the most direct way of defining new knowledge and new technology, and of organizing purposeful and systematic work on fundamental discovery" (Drucker, p. 506).