Successfully managing technological change involves the ability to improvise in response to unexpected opportunities. Organizational changes associated with technology implementation don’t have a beginning and an end; they are ongoing. The authors identify three types of change that build on each other over time. Two conditions that enable the use of an improvisational model are internal alignment and adequate resources.

Are you stifling innovation and creativity by trying to micromanage? Or are you operating your organization as many autonomous fiefdoms and missing the benefits of being one company? Should you give more autonomy to the people who work for you? Or perhaps you feel you should take more control and show “real” leadership?
Nagging questions like [...]

Just as total quality management owes much to tools like statistical process control and the “house of quality,” business process reengineering can benefit from tools to supplement and focus managerial intuition.1 Unfortunately, current tools for managing change don’t do the job.2
Effective change management depends on recognizing complements among technology, practice, and strategy. Interactions play a [...]

It is widely known that many large-scale change management projects involving new information technology (IT) fail for reasons unrelated to technical feasibility and reliability.1 It is also well known that good technology “implementation” and “change management” techniques can substantially increase the chances of success.2 Why, then, do so many organizations fail at IT-enabled transformation? What [...]

In the past, strategy researchers have not focused on turbulent environments. Most of the extant frameworks in strategic management implicitly assume a benign environment that is simple and not very dynamic. Yet, recent advances in technology, coupled with a global political climate that is favorable to free markets, have made parts of many industries such [...]

The Clinton administration’s pressures on the Japanese government in 1995 to increase U.S. companies’ share in Japan’s automobile and auto parts markets and Eastman Kodak’s accusation that Fuji Film uses unfair competitive practices in the Japanese market are the latest in a long series of assertions that Japanese companies collude with each other and with [...]

Many firms have responded to the globalization of business by developing international supply chains1 in which the various value-adding activities comprising a finished product are dispersed geographically in a number of countries.2 At the same time, many businesses have tried to understand and implement lean production systems, pioneeered by Toyota, that encompass goals such as [...]

Many companies formulate product strategies, routinely choose among new product concepts, and plan new product development projects. Yet, when asked where the greatest weakness in product innovation is, the managers at these companies indicate the fuzzy front end.1 They recite some familiar symptoms of front-end failure:

New products are abruptly canceled in midstream because they don’t [...]