Why are some companies able to remain vital, even after extensive reengineering, while others flounder and fail? The answer, according to these authors, lies in a company’s ability to rejuvenate its employees by establishing a behavioral context with four characteristics — discipline, support, trust and stretch. The authors show how companies like Intel and 3M have been able to renew themselves by creating an environment in which people are the most important resource.

Much has been written in recent years about flexible factories and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), but the literature has been largely theoretical; managers who are interested in making their factories more flexible have little empirical research on which to base their decisions. In particular, a number of questions have yet to be answered: What are [...]

Space, buildings, and architecture are not the first things a company thinks about when it is “transforming work.” Yet changes to space and time are basic to evolving concepts of what work means. Employee empowerment, reengineered work processes, organizational learning, and the elimination of work-family barriers do not seem to be connected conceptually to a [...]

The competitiveness of U.S. corporations, particularly manufacturing firms, declined during the 1980s. The decade witnessed serious inroads by foreign firms into traditional domestic markets. In capital goods, for example, the import penetration ratio rose from less than 15 percent to nearly 40 percent. Some indicators of U.S. competitiveness have stabilized or shown some improvement in [...]

The quality movement that has had such a dramatic impact on all industrial sectors has finally reached the systems and software industry. Although some of the concepts of quality management originally developed for other products can be applied to software, as a product that is developed and not produced, it requires a special approach. In [...]

A returns policy for excess inventory is a commitment by a manufacturer, service provider, or distributor upstream to accept products from a downstream channel member. The format of returns policies varies in and across industries. The most generous policy promises to refund the full wholesale price for all returned products, while less generous policies offer [...]

Why do some well-formulated competitive strategies run into roadblocks or end up being stalled by government inaction? Why do some strategies produce unintended consequences inconsistent with a company’s core values? Why are strategies sometimes criticized by the public and threatened by government action? The causes of these problems are frequently found not in a company’s [...]