MIT Sloan Management Review

Why are investors so bullish on companies like Apple and Disney? Is it metrics, management, industry prowess, good investor relations or good timing? Probably all of these. But something else may be at work, too. According to research conducted at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the stock market consistently values certain types of business models more highly than others. In recent years, investors have favored models focused on intellectual property and highly innovative manufacturing.

It”s time to bring morality back into finance – and time for business leaders to take risk seriously.

Together, suppliers organized to save Toyota from a devastating crisis that threatened to halt operations for weeks.

The experiences of an Italian copper-products company yield lessons for firms engaged in global mergers and acquisitions.

Companies frequently mismanage their dealings with suppliers and miss many opportunities to reduce costs. Perhaps it’s time to reexamine purchasing, reestablish some tension in buyer-supplier relationships, and leverage the free market.

Simulation tools can help family and nonfamily business leaders link their thinking to their feelings, strategic plans to relationships, and issues of strategy and stewardship to ownership.

What has led to the development of Japan’s particular method of subcontracting? Theories that have attempted to explain Japanese subcontracting have critical shortcomings. A combination of political, economic, technological, and strategic factors has resulted in subcontracting’s growth and survival.

Are strategic takeovers, which are generally friendly transactions involving stock and firms in overlapping businesses, more profitable than financial deals, which are usually hostile transactions involving cash and firms in unrelated businesses?

Audit failures rarely result from the deliberate collusion of auditors with clients. Instead, auditors may find it psychologically impossible to remain impartial and objective.

Management practices have undergone many innovations. Companies have been down-sized, delayered, and hollowed out. Newly trained and empowered employees have implemented many innovative practices including continuous improvement, reengineering, just-in-time manufacturing, and total quality management. Outsourcing and exclusive supply relationships now allow organizations to focus on core activities.M

While outsourcing might be attractive for some parts of a value center, it is not a substitute for crafting a strategy to leverage IT resources for business success. An effective strategy framework recognizes four interdependent sources of value from IT resources and the approaches for managing each source.

Falling communication costs are enabling companies to decentralize their decision-making structures. Now they must seek a balance between empowerment and control.

Assessing the value of information technology (IT) has never been easy. Delayed benefits, unintended uses, business changes, and hidden support costs inhibit meaningful evaluation of individual IT investments. This was true when most investments were focused on the support of a single business process or functional area.

The persistent U.S. trade imbalance may have two causes: a declining manufacturing base and the shift of the U.S. economy toward services. Correcting the imbalance will require a substantial commitment to expand America’s manufacturing base.

A revolution is now underway. Most innovation occurs first in software.1 And software is the primary element in all aspects of innovation from basic research through product introduction:Software provides the critical mechanism through which managers can lower the costs, compress the time cycles, and increase the value of innovations.

Information technology implementation in organizations has gone from automating back-office clerks to supporting the complex tasks of autonomous knowledge workers.

Superstition has always had a big impact on human behavior, sometimes yielding macroeconomic effects for even the most industrialized societies. An example of the effects of superstition is the rate of Japanese births from 1960 to 1990 (see Figure 1). A general, steady decline is evident in recent decades.

IBM is making a comeback. Although many observers had counted the company out — “It’s a dinosaur, an implosion, a wreck,” various commentators said — its revival was probable, even predictable, because cycles of decline and revitalization have been the company’s pattern through many decades.P

When Eastman Kodak turned over the bulk of its IT operations to three outsourcing partners in 1989, outsourcing was a $4 billion a year business.1 Today, that number has grown to nearly $40 billion a year, according to the estimates of industry watchers Frost & Sullivan.

THE APPROACHES FOR IMPROVING QUALITY IN MANUFACTURING PROCESSES DON’T WORK ESPECIALLY WELL FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. THE AUTHORS provide a quality improvement paradigm for the software industry that builds on manufacturing models but focuses on reused learning and experience by establishing “experience factories.” Their iterative process enables an organization to acquire core competencies to support its strategic capabilities.