By Michael A. Cusumano
Common sense, industry experience, and some academic research all suggest that, when conducting any complex tasks, small teams of talented people are better than large teams of average or talented people. To develop new products quickly, for example, a recent textbook argues that small teams of no more than ten or so people are [...]
By Vikas Kapoor and Arnab Gupta
The importance of a strong marketing function is universally recognized, and every company invests enormous effort in “out-thinking” the customer. But how much energy is the corporation, as customer, spending to out-think suppliers marketing to it? The answer in many cases is not much. Most companies have historically neglected the “reverse marketing” function (or “purchasing”), [...]
By George S. Oldfield and Anthony M. Santomero
If savers and investors and buyers and sellers could locate each other efficiently, purchase any and all assets at no cost, and make their decisions with freely available, perfect information, there would be no need for financial institutions. However, in real economies, market participants seek the services of financial institutions because they can provide market [...]
By Jeanne M. Liedtka, Mark E. Haskins, John W. Rosenblum and Jack Weber
“The essence of strategy is the way a company defines its business and links together the only resources that really matter in today’s economy: knowledge and relationships or an organization’s competencies and customers.”
R. Normann and R. Ramirez1
Let us assume that mastering the capabilities to learn and to collaborate — to manage knowledge and relationships [...]
By Andrew J. Hoffman, Max H. Bazerman and Steven L. Yaffee
If you ask most Americans what they know about the Endangered Species Act (ESA), they will likely respond, “the spotted owl.” This Pacific Northwest controversy epitomizes the conflict between jobs and the environment that the ESA has come to symbolize. To protect the spotted owl, large tracts of federal lands were withheld from logging, the [...]
By Nancy Drozdow and Vincent P. Carroll
Family businesses are particularly vulnerable when coping with the speed of economic, industry, and competitive change. While the members of a founding family can draw on their powerful feelings of loyalty and love to sustain the business in its early years, the same family ties can inhibit change when later generations inherit the business. The [...]
By Toshihiro Nishiguchi and Jonathan Brookfield
Japanese subcontracting is complex and evolutionary, a result of the interplay of historical events and human agents. Consequently, no single theory —whether dualism, flexible specialization, transaction cost economics, or cultural specificity (which we discuss later) — is sufficient to explain it. In this paper, we detail the evolution of Japanese industrial sourcing and view subcontracting [...]
