MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation

The Art of High-Technology Management

By Modesto A. Maidique and Robert H. Hayes

January 15, 1984

The authors argue that, contrary to popular opinion, U.S. firms need not look overseas for models of successfully managed companies. Instead, many U.S. companies can benefit from using well-managed American high-tech firms as their guides. Through their studies of a wide range of high-technology firms, the authors identified those characteristics they believe make a company successful, and grouped them into six themes. Analysis of their findings has led them to conclude that well-managed companies have found ways to resolve a critical dilemma -- the ability to manage conflict between continuity and rapid change.

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Over the past fifteen years, the world's perception of the competence of U.S. companies in managing technology has come full circle. In 1967, a Frenchman, J.-J. Servan-Schreiber, expressed with alarm in his book, The American Challenge, that U.S. technology was far ahead of the rest of the industrialized world.1 This "technology gap," he argued, was continually widening because of the superior ability of Americans to organize and manage technological development.

Today, the situation is perceived to have changed drastically. The concern now is that the gap is reversing: the onslaught of Japanese and/or European challenges is threatening America's technological leadership. Even such informed Americans as Dr. Simon Ramo express great concern: In his book, America's Technology Slip, Dr. Ramo notes the apparent inability of U.S. companies to compete technologically with their foreign counterparts.2 Moreover, in the best seller The Art of Japanese Management, the authors use as a basis of comparison two technology-based firms: Matsushita (Japanese) and ITT (American).3 Here, the Japanese firm is depicted as a model for managers, while the management practices of the U.S. firm are sharply criticized.

Nevertheless, a number of U.S. companies appear to be fending off these foreign challenges successfully. These firms are repeatedly included on lists of "America's best-managed companies." Many of them are competitors in the R&D intensive industries,... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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