Strategic Management

Strategic management is the discipline concerned with formulating, implementing, and evaluating long-term plans and actions that enable an organization to achieve its goals and adapt to a changing environment. It integrates analysis, decision-making, and leadership to ensure that the organization’s resources, structure, and direction are aligned with its mission, vision, and competitive advantage.

Smarter Choices, Better Ideas: How to Make Decisions and Innovate Like a Pro

~ Manuel Castañón-Puga

Big choices don’t just happen; they follow a simple path. First, notice that a decision needs to be made. Then gather solid info from inside and outside your world. List your options, weigh the evidence, pick one, act, and later assess the outcome. That’s the whole loop, and doing it on purpose makes success more likely. Ahumada-Tello et al. explain this step-by-step process and stress the importance of using reliable data at each stage to avoid guesswork. Today, there’s a flood of data to help you: from basic spreadsheets to tools like data mining and business intelligence. Used well, these don’t replace your judgment—they sharpen it.

Innovation isn’t only about inventing the next smartphone. It can be a new product you can touch, a new service you experience, or a better way to do the work behind the scenes. Consider a supermarket that introduces home delivery (service), a store transitioning from paper forms to digital dashboards (process), or phones that continually add features year after year (product). Changes can be small or huge. Rebranding a snack is incremental. Jumping from older mobile networks to 3G or 4G was revolutionary because it reshaped what phones could do and how the entire industry operated. Sometimes the change is to a single part (modular), like swapping a camera lens. At other times, the entire setup is re-wired (architecturally), such as the transition from film to digital cameras, which altered how every piece fits together.

So what matters most for a team’s results? In a study of tech firms in Tijuana, researchers found that clear, professional decision-making had the strongest link to better organizational performance, even more than new-product work or innovation programs. In their model: Performance = −4.876 + 0.152×New Product Development + 0.102×Innovation Management + 0.403×Decision-Making Process. That big 0.403 shows decision-making packs the biggest punch. The takeaway is simple: learn to structure choices, manage information well, and you’ll boost your outcomes—even before you launch the next big feature.

How do you put this into practice day-to-day? Start small. When you’re picking a class, a side hustle, or a project idea, run the mini-cycle: define the problem, collect relevant info, list options, rate the pros and cons, decide, act, and review what you learned. Use easy data sources—such as surveys, quick tests, or simple dashboards—to keep emotions from steering the ship. Then look for innovation sweeps you can actually do: a smoother process for your study group, a fresh service twist for your freelance gig, or a tiny product upgrade that delights people. Small, steady improvements build momentum, and when a radical opportunity appears, you’ll be ready to make a confident call backed by a clear process.

Reference:
Ahumada-Tello, E., Castañón-Puga, M., Gaxiola-Pacheco, C., & Evans, R. D. (2019). Applied decision making in design innovation management. In Studies in Systems, Decision and Control (Vol. 209). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17985-4_5

City Building 101: Why “Where Stuff Goes” Shapes Your Day

~ Manuel Castañón-Puga

Sandoval-Félix et al. examine a simple question with significant everyday effects: where should a city allocate homes, jobs, and roads to ensure smooth operation? They model Ensenada, Mexico, and introduce a handy idea called “Attractive Land Footprints.” Think of these as spots that are extra tempting for new factories because they’re near workers and big roads, on gentle slopes, and away from homes. These spots don’t stay put—they pop up, move, shrink, or disappear as the city changes. That constant shape-shifting is why planning rules need to keep up.

Here’s the twist: the model finds that more of these “attractive” factory zones fall in places the current rules don’t allow than in places they do. In plain terms, demand for good industrial space exceeds what the plan permits. That mismatch pushes industry to bend rules or sprawl into awkward spots, which you feel as longer commutes, clogged streets, and noisy trucks cutting through neighborhoods. The authors even see a future “attractive” corridor forming along a northeastern road—useful if the road exists and rules adapt, frustrating if not.

Density—how many people live in an area—ends up being a quiet hero. When density is low, the city spreads out, and those attractive spots are quickly consumed by other uses, especially housing. The model shows that at 10–15 people per hectare, as much as 65% of those desirable areas can be urbanized in a single year; at around 35 people per hectare (Ensenada’s current average), that drops to about 14%. Translation: Compact neighborhoods help protect space for jobs, which in turn protects your time and wallet. If density slips lower, industry tends to locate in worse places more often, and residential projects often occupy the very land that would have made commutes shorter and deliveries cheaper.

So what should young residents take from this? First, roads matter: without strong connections, even “perfect” locations won’t work, and good jobs end up farther away. Second, rules matter: if plans ignore how attractive spots really form, the city grows in messy ways you feel daily. Third, your housing choices matter too: choosing, supporting, and voting for denser, well-located neighborhoods helps keep industry near major roads and workers, not next to your bedroom window. In short, smarter density, updated rules, and better road links make everyday life—commuting, deliveries, prices—smoother for everyone. That’s the message behind the model: pay attention to where stuff goes, because it quietly shapes how you live.

Reference:
Sandoval-Félix, J., Castañón-Puga, M., & Gaxiola-Pacheco, C. G. (2021). Analyzing urban public policies of the city of Ensenada in Mexico using an attractive land footprint agent-based model. Sustainability (Switzerland), 13(2), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020714

Find the Five Levers: How Small Actions Can Shape a Town

~ Manuel Castañón-Puga

Imagine your town as a giant group chat where every issue—housing, jobs, parks, beach access—keeps reacting to everything else. That’s how Sandoval et al. look at real places: as networks where problems and opportunities are linked, not isolated. When you map those links, you can identify the “bridge” issues that drive the rest, and focus your energy there instead of trying to fix everything at once. It’s a smarter way to plan because it shows how actions in one corner ripple across daily life.

They tested this in Bahía de Los Ángeles, a small coastal community with epic natural areas, a small population, and growing pressure from tourism and real estate development. Think calm waters, protected islands, and a town of only about 800 people—beautiful, but fragile. That mix brings tough choices about land, access, and conservation that affect locals and visitors alike.

To understand what really matters, the team asked residents and authorities to list what’s working, what’s not, and what they want for the future. From those answers, they built a network of 51 everyday issues—everything from water and internet to jobs and beach access—and measured how each one influences or is influenced by the others. It’s like seeing which messages in that group chat start the longest threads.

Here’s the punchline for everyday life: five issues act as power hubs that can shift the whole system—lack of long-term planning, irregular settlements, inadequate infrastructure and services, migration, and a lack of political will. If a community strengthens just those, many other problems also begin to emerge. For example, planning and political will are tightly linked; when leaders stall, planning stalls, and risky building and weak services follow. And while migration sounds “social,” it sits at a key junction, so plans that include training, local jobs, and fair rules can ease pressure elsewhere. In short, find the bridges, not just the loudest complaints, and you’ll get more change for the effort.

Reference:
Sandoval, J., Castañón-Puga, M., Gaxiola-Pacheco, C., & Suarez, E. (2017). Identifying Clusters of Complex Urban–Rural Issues as Part of Policy Making Process Using a Network Analysis Approach: A Case Study in Bahía de Los Ángeles, Mexico. Sustainability, 9(6), 1059. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9061059