MIT Sloan Management Review

“Just as bad money has always driven out good, so the talented general manager — the person who makes a company go — is being overwhelmed by a flood of so-called professionals,’ textbook executives more interested in the form of management than the content, more concerned about defining and categorizing and quantifying the job, than [...]

What do investment bankers Goldman Sachs, management consultants McKinsey, accountants Arthur Andersen, compensation and benefits consultants Hewitt Associates, and lawyers Latham & Watkins have in common? Besides being among the most profitable firms (if not the most profitable) in their respective professions? Besides being considered by their peers among the best managed firms in their [...]

This article shows how the value-added chain can be used to analyze sources of international strategic advantages. The author argues that it is essential that a distinction be drawn between competitive and comparative advantage. He illustrates the importance of this distinction by looking at structural shifts in the world economy and arguing that these shifts reflect changes in comparative advantage. The impact of these changes leads to only a few choices for the firm facing import competition and possessing no competitive advantage.

Product quality is rapidly becoming an important competitive issue. The superior reliability of many Japanese products has sparked considerable soul-searching among American managers.1 In addition, several surveys have voiced consumers’ dissatisfaction with the existing levels of quality and service of the products they buy.2 In a recent study of the business units of major North [...]

WHAT MAKES an organization effective? For a long time we thought we had the answer. Frederick Taylor told us about the “one best way” at the turn of the century, and organizations long pursued this holy grail. First it was Taylor’s time and motion studies, later the participative management of the human relations people, in [...]

THE PRESSURE ON today’s corporate managers to maximize short-term profits often seems at odds with the need for a research and development program that will sustain company value over the long term. The solution to this apparent dilemma starts with the recognition that a business enterprise’s value depends on the level and rate of growth [...]

A BANK. FORECLOSED on a loan and took control of a small piece of real estate. The .property was later found to be contaminated with hazardous wastes and, after a long-drawn-out court case, the bank was held liable for half a million dollars.

The manager of a large manufacturing conglomerate’s subsidiary was notified by the head [...]

Analog Devices Chairman Ray Stata argues that U.S. industry’s most serious competitive problem lies in shrinking innovation, and sees organizational learning as the key to encouraging and sustaining future innovation. Through his work at the MIT’s Management Style Project, he combines theory and practice to better understand how to encourage organizational learning and adapt it to encourage innovation.

SUPERIOR SERVICE IS FASHIONABLE in the business press these days. From the American Banker to Fortune magazine, service cheer-leaders extol the virtues of investing to improve all types of customer service across industries ranging from financial services to manufacturing. One magazine notes that the rewards of service have never been clearer. Similarly, competitors in every [...]

IN A COMPANION ARTICLE (Summer 1987), we described how recent changes in the international operating environment have forced companies to optimize efficiency, responsiveness, and learning simultaneously in their worldwide operations. To companies that previously concentrated on developing and managing one of these capabilities, this new challenge implied not only a total strategic reorientation but a [...]