Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2011

Japan is famous for its lean production systems and efficient supply chains. Large companies such as Toyota and Sony were forced to halt production not because of damage to their own factories, which were quickly checked and ready to go back online, but because they were dependent on a small number of parts from suppliers in Tohoku.

Supply Chain 15

Supply Chain Long-term Lean Production Globalization 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 15, 2014

How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? Look at the variance of your new-market products.

Black-Scholes 8

Black-Scholes Products Productivity CAPM 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 27, 2015

In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. That would never fly in marketing, operations research, or even accounting, where academics are all over new developments. A few decades ago, U.S. Let me explain. So schools need to step up.

Lean Production 8

Lean Production Operations Health Care Talent Management 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

While developing expertise is the most certain way to reduce entrepreneurial risk, many other strategies exist: Process — Using the right processes to deal with market uncertainty (e.g. Lean Product Development and Customer Development processes) decreases the chance of a startup’s failure.

Career 10

Career Company IPO Christensen 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 12, 2012

2 in its market; he also insisted that every business provide value no competitor could match, and that they all should be able to gain leverage from GE's distinctive strength in complex, engineering-intensive industrial enterprises — or they wouldn't fit. We have seen the market penalize that approach.

Welch 10

Welch Diversity Hedge Chemicals 10

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 22, 2015

Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production. Some companies brought together Six Sigma and lean production into “Lean Six Sigma” as a way of competing with both lower costs and higher quality.

Six Sigma 8

Six Sigma Company Lean Production Taylorism 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 28, 2015

Managers constantly try to fit new market needs to existing processes and routines. automakers took decades to adopt lean production methods despite the obvious benefits from increased productivity and lower work-in-process inventory. This reduced the entry barriers in the market, which was then flooded with product.

Technology 8

Technology Depreciation Christensen Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2012

There's something about the culture of business that tends toward excess — in financial markets, to be sure, but also in the "market" for new ideas and management techniques. How can we apply what we've always been great at to markets or customer segments we've never worked with?

Innovation 21

Innovation Airlines Six Sigma Lean Production 21

Harvard Business Review

MAY 2, 2016

Generally, what we see is the country where the final assembly of a product took place. Almost every sophisticated manufacturer uses some kind of lean production system that pulls raw materials in from a warehouse. Regions that have thick markets of suppliers have a big advantage. Nearness to market.

Supply Chain 8

Supply Chain Globalization Cost Efficiency 8