Articles in Category: ‘Leadership and Organization Studies’
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The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign
AT THE TURN of the century, Frederick Taylor revolutionized the workplace with his ideas on work organization, task decomposition, and job measurement. Taylor’s basic aim was to increase organizational productivity by applying to human labor the same engineering principles that had proven so successful in solving the technical problems in the work environment. The same [...]
Toward Middle-Up-Down Management: Accelerating Information Creation
THE CONCEPTS of “top-down” and “bottom-up” management pervade management research and the popular business literature. Both center on information flow and information processing. Top-down management emphasizes the process of implementing and refining decisions made by top management as they are transmitted to the lower levels of the organization. Bottom-up management emphasizes the influence of information [...]
The Line Takes the Leadership — IS Management in a Wired Society
WHEN GEORGE DAVID conceptualized an approach to elevator maintenance based on a centralized computer communications network, he had no idea it would become a notable example of the use of information technology to gain competitive advantage. Yet the story of the major improvement in customer service made possible by OTISLINE, the Otis system, has been [...]
Technology in Services: Creating Organizational Revolutions
SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES have radically reordered the power relationships, competitive environments, and leverageable opportunities in most industries — whether in services or manufacturing. In the process, they are obliterating long-held precepts about management itself and creating entirely new strategic, organizational, and control system options for achieving competitive advantage. What are some of the more important management [...]
Toward a Definition of Corporate Transformation
Recent articles and books have detailed how firms, in an effort to transform themselves, either succeed brilliantly or fail miserably. Academics and consultants have found a large audience for the lessons learned and techniques used at Xerox, Motorola, Ford, General Electric, British Airways, and AT&T, to mention a few. There is equal interest in the [...]
Improving the Corporate Disclosure Process
During the past several years, the business community has been fascinated by a debate over the functioning of capital markets and the need for market reform. Contributing to the debate are a variety of academics, investors, financial commentators, and government policymakers who, through published reports and research, are challenging the conventional wisdom of market efficiency [...]
Cultural Transformation at NUMMI
U.S. automobile manufacturers have begun to heed the wakeup call that sounded more than a decade ago when Japanese automakers cut deeply into American markets. As General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler began to take stock of what had happened, they were surprised to discover that they had much to learn from the Japanese, not only [...]
Patterned Chaos in Human Resource Management
Three professionals — an architect, an accountant, and a human resource professional —were contemplating a profound existential question. What, besides the obvious, was the oldest profession?
The architect spoke first: “God created the world in six days, and that took a master design. So, obviously, architecture is the oldest profession.”
“Not at all,” replied the accountant. “You [...]
CEO Thought Summit
On October 28, 1994, the MIT Sloan School and Price Waterhouse cohosted a roundtable discussion among CEOs, PW partners, and Sloan faculty. Walter Kiechel, then managing editor of Fortune, moderated the discussion, which focused on the organization in the year 2020 — its size, structure, leadership, and mission.
The conversation, of which we publish only a [...]