EVERYONE IS SPEEDING PRODUCTS TO MARKET THESE DAYS. BUT REDUCING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TIME IS ONLY HALF OF THE equation; the other half is penetrating the market quickly. The author draws on published research and industry practice to develop five recommendations for reducing market penetration time. He also develops a tracking and diagnostic tool to help managers determine where their market penetration strategy is weak.
JAPAN HAS NO MORE RABBITS TO PULL OUT OF THE HAT — ITS AUTOMOTIVE PRODUCTION SYSTEM HAS MATURED, AND THE INDUSTRY IS IN DECLINE. SO ARGUES the author, who shows how exchange rates, demographics, and the increasing sophistication of U.S. management are causing a shift in relative competitiveness. Furthermore, these changes affect most Japanese industries, and U.S. managers should be prepared to take advantage of them.
How individual learning is transferred back to the organization is crucial to organizational learning. To this end, the author developed a model linking individual and organizational learning through mental models — the thought constructs affecting how people and organizations operate in the world — presenting a framework to better align the learning process with an organization’s goals, vision and values.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN COMPUTER SOFTWARE HAVE SUBSTANTIALLY IMPROVED THE GROUP BRAINSTORMING PROCESS. THE AUTHORS describe research showing that electronic brainstorming groups are more productive than groups that use traditional, oral brainstorming — and participants like the process more. Electronic brainstorming allows widely dispersed groups to interact, reduces the problems associated with oral brainstorming, and improves the productivity of larger groups.
During the 1980s, executives learned of the strategic role that information systems (IS) could provide to organizations. Through IS, companies could squelch competition, secure suppliers, obtain customer loyalty, and reduce the threat of new entrants.
ARE SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIPS CRITICAL TO JAPANESE FIRMS’ SUCCESS? AND WHY ARE JAPANESE SUPPLIERS MORE COOPERATIVE AND WILLING to take risks than U.S. suppliers? Using their research on supplier-automaker relationships in the United States and Japan, the authors focus on the advantages of the Japanese approach and suggest ways to adopt the practice for American companies.
More than three years ago, Thomas Lyons et al. noted that U.S. manufacturers and their suppliers were being pushed by world-class competition to develop new styles of relating to one another.1