個案總覽

The emerging markets have cooled off lately, but they're still growing, even as the rest of the world shrinks. That's one reason why developing countries - and the companies based there - will become more formidable players in the future. A second is that companies on the frontiers saw the downturn coming from developed countries and revised their strategies. They're innovating and improving operations aggressively, while their governments implement policies that will change the game of business. Multinationals need to recognize that and prepare for several tectonic shifts: Developing economies will become less dependent on developed ones, evolve a different model of business leadership, set off countertrends in M&A, and demand unprecedented levels of environmental sustainability. And Africa is poised to become the next hot spot of growth.

Decades of short-term management have inflated the importance of CEOs and reduced employees to fungible commodities. Middle managers, who see the connections between operations and strategy, can be instrumental in rebuilding a sense of community in businesses.

An employee union is threatening Detonation Media with a strike. What should the company do? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0907B and R0907Z: Richard L. Trumka, Richard B. Freeman, and Jeffrey Anderson.

An employee union is threatening Detonation Media with a strike. What should the company do? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0907B and R0907Z: Richard L. Trumka, Richard B. Freeman, and Jeffrey Anderson.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. At some point, every manager has had to tell someone to wait. In the factory, this can lead to stockpiles of goods or bottlenecks. When people are involved, it can lead to inefficiency and anger. But the psychological impact of waits can be managed, and studies in design show us how. In places where waits are required, some basic principles can not only make waiting more pleasant but also can make them not feel like waits at all. Sometimes inducing a wait can improve customer experience. When waits are inevitable, the research shows, the goal should be to optimize the experience for both customers and employees, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing employee stress and turnover. This research can help managers in many situations, even those not involving lines. There are three main lessons managers can take from how designers manage lines: Manage understanding with fair practices and open communication, manage perceived fairness by reframing what waiting is, and manage memories, because they last much longer than the event itself.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Edward R. Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and other classics of information visualization, says that businesses would think better, make better decisions and present themselves more powerfully if they would only learn to talk -both among themselves and externally -in facts. To present themselves and their products better and more honestly, Tufte recommends that companies concentrate on delivering facts (rather than pitches), deliver as many of those facts as they can, not count on the marketing department to make it happen, and look to news sites and scientific publications for models of success. In particular, he argues that Google Inc. is where most companies should turn for design inspiration, and Tufte continues his examination of the corrosive influence that he says presentation software has on thought. Following his big ideas about information presentation, he says, will help companies differentiate themselves.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds help world-renowned executives, politicians and thought leaders deliver stronger presentations. In a talk with MIT Sloan Management Review, they consider not how to make better presentations -their books handle that -but how to become a better manager by thinking more like a designer. They argue that managers and designers have to do many of the same things: embrace restraints, take risks, question everything and make sure that tools don't get in the way of ideas. And they reveal how design concepts such as hierarchy, balance, contrast, clear space and harmony are just as relevant to managers as they are to designers.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies are aware of the potential benefits of "open innovation"-relying on outsiders both as a source of ideas and as a means to commercialize them -but they have struggled with precisely how to open up their product development to the external world. For starters, many executives have little idea how to motivate and manage outside innovation. Specifically, should external innovators be organized as a collaborative community or as a competitive market? Collaborative communities are perhaps best known through Linux and other open-source software efforts that are governed loosely by social norms and "soft" rules to encourage open access to information, transparency, joint development and the sharing of intellectual property. Competitive markets are strikingly different. Rather than collaborating, external innovators in a market will develop multiple competing varieties of complementary goods, components or services. Customers then choose from among the different offerings, and this often results in fierce competition -and little cooperation -among the innovators. Because the dynamics of communities and markets are so dramatically different, companies need to consider carefully which approach makes the best sense for their objectives. From their research, the authors have identified three critical issues that managers should take into account when making that decision: 1) the type of innovation that will be shifted to external innovators, 2) the motivations of those individuals, and 3) the nature of the platform business model. An in-depth analysis of those issues reveals that the choice between communities and markets is not as obvious -nor as clear-cut -as it might first appear.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It's hard to pick up a major management magazine -and we're not excluding this one -and not find several articles outlining in painful detail where a leader went wrong in a particular case. Implicitly or explicitly in these stories, the employees are treated as receptive individuals waiting only for the boss to offer a productive channel to their intrinsic energies. But when a boss stumbles, it may be as a direct result of actions taken by employees who have sabotaged their actions. To keep this from happening, leaders must: 1. Understand the situation they are walking into. Leaders need to know how they are likely to be perceived and what their predecessor was like. 2. Invest early in subordinates. New bosses need to spend significant time one-on-one with employees for three reasons: to understand them; to get to know them; and to establish a rapport. 3. Be mindful of their own behavior. New leaders often overestimate the extent to which their good intentions and good character will shine through. Demonstrating one's "authentic self " does not mean "being natural." Rather, it requires managers to seize everyday opportunities to demonstrate that they are trustworthy, supportive and fair. 4. Intervene early. New bosses need to take action if there is a problem. Letting things fester only postpones the inevitable.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Editor's Note: MIT Sloan Management Review first published "The New Practice of Global Product Development"in our Summer 2006 edition. In the article, authors Steven D. Eppinger and Anil R. Chitkara examined state-of-the-art and emerging best practices in global product development (GPD). GPD continues to evolve, and in 2009, we asked Eppinger, the General Motors Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, to update the article with new insights about GPD. His additions are published here along side the 2006 article, annotating the original text.

Executives in the financial services industry, which faces intense scrutiny, should learn from the experiences of the oil, gas, and mining industry.

Replacing expensive data centers with outsourced computing or remote portable server farms allows businesses to rapidly change capacity and offers flexibility - an important edge.

The business model of utilities is essentially broken. The solution? Start charging customers for energy services, not energy output.

Manufacturers in emerging markets are getting fewer orders from multinationals - which are shocked by many suppliers' bankruptcy. Both groups must evaluate potential partners more rigorously.

As free trade agreements become more popular, they present global executives with thorny strategic and operational decisions.

The head of Georgia Tech's architecture program predicts that new kinds of retail developments will rise from the ashes of today's dying suburban malls.

The case entitled 'Lessons from Breakthrough Strategic Moves Over the Last Century' illustrates how businesses over the last 100 years have periodically broken away from the competition to create and capture new market space - often giving rise to entirely new industries. Yet, to date, there is very little understanding of the underlying strategic logic behind these breakthrough strategic moves. This case and its accompanying video examines whether there is a shared pattern across these strategic moves by examining three representative industries that touch peoples' everyday lives: autos - how people get to work; computers - what people use at work; and movie theaters - where people go after work for entertainment.

The case entitled 'How to Implement Blue Ocean Strategy' challenges participants to apply key concepts of blue ocean strategy implementation to overcome key organizational and management hurdles while leading a strategic shift. The case lays out how Braynesbridge Industries (BI), a fictional conglomerate involved in the steel industry, recently launched a new strategy to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition in the industry. The new strategy, however, represented a significant departure from the status quo, which led to steep cognitive, resource, motivational, and political hurdles in the organization. Hence, to implement the new strategy, BI executives had to overcome these four key hurdles. Despite this challenge, the case reveals that BI's management team successfully implemented the strategy fast and at low cost using tipping point leadership and fair process. BI's Board of Directors, very impressed with the new strategy and its successful implementation, is curious to learn the principles of tipping point leadership and fair process and how these apply to organizations.

The case entitled 'How a US Consumer Products Company Unlocked the Three Tiers of Noncustomers' illustrates how new demand is created by looking to noncustomers instead of just competing for a share of the existing customers of an industry. The case prompts the students to consider how new demand was created in the cell phone, computer and air travel industries by unlocking the three tiers of noncustomers.