MIT Sloan Management Review

What are the strategies, policies, practices and decisions that result in successful management of high-technology enterprises? On the basis of interviews conducted in a cross section of high-tech industries, the authors have identified common corporate characteristics, concluding that most have resolved a critical dilemma — the ability to manage conflict between continuity and rapid change.

Many large established firms currently seem to be trying hard to improve their capacity for managing internal entrepreneurship and new ventures. Companies like Du Pont and General Electric have appointed CEOs with a deep understanding of the innovation process.1 IBM has generated much interest with its concept of “independent business units.”2 To head its new [...]

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 [...]

OVER THE PAST DECADE, senior managers in banking, insurance, health care, and other service industries have invested billions of dollars in computers and communication equipment—technology investments that promise to hone operations into an acute competitive weapon. But executives have been deluded; the payoffs have not been fully realized.

Recent studies by the American Quality & Productivity [...]

AN AUTO PARTS MANUFACTURER in Northern Europe started to slip in profitability. For historical reasons, manufacturing was organized in a very disjointed way with facilities scattered over the countryside, each managed independently and concentrating on only a part of the full production process. Consolidation seemed advisable to regain profitability and the managing director pondered which [...]

IN TODAY’S COMPETITIVE WORLD, the effective use of information technology (IT) as an element of a competitive strategy is critical. In the literature there are numerous examples of how organizations have used information technology to build and sustain new relationships with suppliers or customers and, as a result, have achieved a significant competitive advantage.1 A [...]

SEVERAL STUDIES published in the 1980s indicated that Japanese firms, led by Toyota, have achieved the highest levels of manufacturing efficiency in the world automobile industry. Physical productivity, which reflects the “throughput” speed for completing products and the amount of labor required, has been significantly higher than in most U.S. plants (although differences vary by [...]

Another area in which U.S. firms have often lagged behind their overseas competitors is in exploiting the potential for continuous improvement in the quality and reliability of their products and processes. The cumulative effect of successive incremental improvements and modification to established products and processes can be very large and may outpace efforts to achieve [...]

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 [...]

FOR THE PAST TWO DECADES, the question of what impact information technology (IT) will have on business organizations has continued to puzzle academics and practitioners alike. Indeed, in an era when the business press has widely disseminated the idea that IT is changing the way businesses operate and the way they relate to customers and [...]