個案總覽

In December 1998, an intellectual property executive at DuPont pondered a new program for the 196-year-old company. The executive was reviewing a proposal to donate DuPont patents to universities around the United States. The move promised substantial financial benefits for DuPont-the company could save on fees to maintain the patents, and they could gain significant tax deductions. But should DuPont make such a donation, and if so, should it offer patents in the life sciences or in another discipline? Did the program hold any strategic or tax-related risks for DuPont?

This case examines a set of expansion options for a successful Internet luggage retailer, with a particular emphasis on the operational complexities.

Go shopping in the "dollar channel" with this case, which explores the decision of a fast-growing company to expand its distribution network. The case provides financial information that allows students to build an understanding of the basic distribution-network design, which covers inbound transportation, outbound transportation, distribution-center operations, and inventory.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For several decades, research about large companies' internal corporate venturing (ICV) has shown that such activities frequently exhibit substantial cyclicality. Companies may enthusiastically launch ICV initiatives, later shut them down, and still later launch new ICV programs again. Describes four common situations that occur in cycles of corporate venturing. Argues that, unless properly managed, corporate commitment to ICV is apt to fluctuate according to the availability of uncommitted financial resources and the growth prospects of the organization's primary businesses. For example, if the corporation has uncommitted financial resources but the growth prospects of the main business are perceived to be insufficient, then the company may launch a top-down "all-out ICV drive" that is vulnerable to costly mistakes. If, however, the growth prospects of the primary business are perceived to be adequate and there are few uncommitted financial resources, top management is likely to perceive ICV as largely irrelevant. Examines factors contributing to ICV cyclicality and suggests that companies can achieve better outcomes if executives recognize the strategic importance of internal corporate venturing activities and view them as a way of gaining insights into emerging opportunities.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In many companies, there has been a marked drop in the influence, stature, and significance of the corporate marketing department. Today, marketing is often less of a corporate function and more a diaspora of skills and capabilities spread across the organization. Argues that by itself, the disintegration of the marketing center is not a cause for concern, but the decline of core marketing competence certainly is. Examines a series of in-depth interviews with leading marketing executives and CEOs to clarify the root causes of the decline. The research identifies eight distinct factors that contribute to marketing's waning influence--among them a worrying "short-termism," significant shifts in channel power, and marketing's inability to document its contribution to business results. The consequences are not immediate, but they are far-reaching: Absent a core of marketing competence, the corporate brand will suffer, product innovation will weaken, and prices will be less robust. However, the fact that marketing does continue to influence corporate strategy in some companies suggests there are opportunities and viable approaches for building marketing competence as a source of competitive advantage. Suggests four key issues facing marketing management, placing the focus not on restoration of the corporate marketing function but on the rebuilding of marketing competence across the organization.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Corporate executives typically have strategic explanations for their acquisitions: buying the company in question makes sense geographically or the products are synergistic. However, if you inquire two years later how the company has benefited, managers tend to focus on the "softer" factors with comments like, "They made us rethink our decision-making processes," or "They introduced us to a new approach to product development," or simply "They shook up our culture." Analyzes the acquisitions and performance of a number of large, successful companies. Several of the companies included in the research suffered from rigidity. However, the companies were found to use acquisitions to restore a sense of vitality to their businesses and unleash a subsequent surge in performance. The acquired companies often stimulated the acquiring companies to develop new perspectives and different ways of doing things at critical times, keeping their organizations fresh and vital. Even if the enterprises did not pursue acquisitions for this reason, the process of buying businesses and deciding how to integrate them into their corporate structures enabled acquirers to renew themselves before their products and operating methods became outdated.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Too many managers are burned out on strategic change. They have lived through the scenario in which the CEO announces a bold initiative designed to lift performance dramatically. The initiative calls for sweeping changes in the company's processes, systems, and culture--and large resource investments. Despite some short-term gains, it's common for the organization to slip back into old ways of doing things. Argues for a system that enables change initiatives to stick. Uses a detailed case study (a disguised large clothing retailer) to demonstrate what it takes to produce sustainable changes in processes, behavior, or performance. Uncovers four critical processes--chartering, learning, mobilizing, and realigning--that pave the way for successful institutionalization of a strategic change initiative. The elements rely much more on an understanding of the mix of task-related, emotional, and behavioral factors than is fashionable in today's metrics-driven environment. Also highlights the study's divergence from conventional wisdom about programmatic change, arguing that managers need to set in motion a series of processes right at the start if widespread changes are to stick.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. There are three reasons why companies have trouble finding and hiring top-notch executives. First, even organizations that are adept at selecting winners will have considerable difficulty because of the way in which managerial talent is distributed across a population. Second, assessing people for senior positions is inherently tricky for a number of reasons. For one thing, the differentiating competencies for top leaders are usually in "soft" areas--such as the ability to develop people or manage change efforts--each of which is very difficult to measure in any reliable way. Finally, powerful psychological biases impair the quality of the hiring decision. Nevertheless, organizations can overcome those obstacles by deploying a set of basic practices: Define before looking, cast a wide net, compare apples with apples, evaluate thoroughly, filter biases, limit the number of people involved, close the deal, and facilitate the integration. Although some of these practices might seem obvious, many companies fail to follow them. All too often, for instance, organizations make the mistake of commencing an executive search before they know what they're really looking for. Or they unnecessarily restrict the search to certain markets, industries, or geographic regions.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Increasingly, the government agencies that enforce antitrust laws are scrutinizing organizations' marketing, and shifts in practices in the early 2000s have reinvigorated enforcement activity. Understanding what behavior raises antitrust flags is critical for companies with dominant market share in one or more product categories. There has been increasing scrutiny of shelf-slotting practices and category management in the retail sector, for example. Takes managers through the process of determining antitrust violation and lays out five important cases in which practices that seemed to fit with competitive norms or good citizenship, in fact, were ruled to be breaches of antitrust law--in some cases, with momentous penalties. Describes a sampling of the tactics that can help to temper competitiveness with caution. Concludes that it is fundamental for managers to look at their competitive tactics--and at the business strategies and processes that support those tactics--through the eyes of antitrust regulators.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Futurists have long anticipated the day when computers would relieve managers and professionals of the need to make certain types of decisions. But automated decision making has been slow to materialize. Argues that automated decision making is finally coming of age and the new generation of applications differs substantially from prior decision-support systems. Today's applications are easier to create and manage than earlier systems. Rather than require people to identify the problems or to initiate the analysis, companies typically embed decision-making capabilities in the normal flow of work. Those systems then sense online data, apply codified knowledge or logic, and make decisions--all with minimal amounts of human intervention. They can help businesses generate decisions that are more consistent than those made by people, and they can help managers move quickly from insight to decision to action--helping companies reduce labor costs, leverage scarce expertise, improve quality, enforce policies, and respond to customers. As automating decisions becomes more feasible, organizations need to think about which decisions people must make and which can be computerized.

From a converted muffler repair shop, Ray Kelner launched RLK Media in 1985, selling its radical audio speakers to affluent connoisseurs for $20,000 a pop. By the 1990s, RLK had grown into a billion-dollar business. But things are no longer going so well, and chairman Keith Harrington lays it all at the feet of CEO Lars Inman. "Your margins have evaporated," he barks. "You're missing your numbers. People aren't buying the old product, and you don't have anything new." But RLK might just have something new: the iVid headset prototype is light-years ahead of the competition. All Ray needs is another 18 months (or so) and $6 million to hire 10 elite software developers and he could put RLK back on the map. Lars considers outsourcing software development to Inova Laboratories in India, which promises to move RLK from prototype to volume manufacturing in 12 months--at a fifth the cost. But Ray is adamant. His group is just too tightly knit. Should Lars outsource R&D anyway? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0507A and R0507Z, are Larry Huston, VP for innovation and knowledge at Procter & Gamble; former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown and consultant John Hagel III; Claremont Graduate University professor Jean Lipman-Blumen; and Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, an IT services company based in Bangalore, India.

What does it mean to be a high-performance company? The process of measuring relative performance across industries and eras, declaring top performers, and finding the common drivers of their success is such a difficult one that it might seem a fool's errand to attempt. In fact, no one did for the first thousand or so years of business history. The question didn't even occur to many scholars until Tom Peters and Bob Waterman released In Search of Excellence in 1982. Twenty-three years later, we've witnessed several more attempts--and, just maybe, we're getting closer to answers. In this reported piece, HBR senior editor Julia Kirby explores why it's so difficult to study high performance and how various research efforts--including those from John Kotter and Jim Heskett; Jim Collins and Jerry Porras; Bill Joyce, Nitin Nohria, and Bruce Roberson; and several others outlined in a summary chart--have attacked the problem. The challenge starts with deciding which companies to study closely. Are the stars the ones with the highest market caps, the ones with the greatest sales growth, or simply the ones that remain standing at the end of the game? (And when's the end of the game?) Each major study differs in how it defines success, which companies it therefore declares to be worthy of emulation, and the patterns of activity and attitude it finds in common among them. Yet, Kirby concludes, as each study's method incrementally solves problems others have faced, we are progressing toward a consensus theory of high performance.

Some teams, by the very nature of their work, must consistently perform at the highest levels. How do you--as a team leader, a supervisor, a trainer, or an outside coach--ensure that this happens? To answer this question, Harvard Business Review asked six people who work with high-performance teams to comment on developing and managing these teams. The result is a collection of commentaries from Michael Hillmann, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and commander of its Special Operations Bureau, which includes the SWAT team; Philippe Dongier, who headed up a joint United Nations/World Bank/Asian Development Bank reconstruction team in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban; the National Fire Academy's Robert Murgallis, who trains firefighting teams; Mary Khosh, former career coach for players with the Cleveland Browns; Elizabeth Allen, a planner of society weddings, charity galas, and corporate events; and Ray Evernham, who, as a stock-car-racing crew chief, helped driver Jeff Gordon win three NASCAR championships. The types of teams represented in these commentaries are very different. Some are ad hoc, formed for a specific task, while others are ongoing, typically improving their performance with each task they undertake. For all of them, the stakes are high. Despite their differences, some similarities emerge in the ways they achieve top performance. For example, selection of team members is crucial--as is a willingness to get rid of members who don't consistently deliver. A leader who supports and builds confidence in members is also key, and high-performance teams without such a leader will often informally create one. Finally, the stress that defines the work of these teams helps generate peak short-term performance--and poses the constant risk of members burning out.

Tales of great strategies derailed by poor execution are all too common. That's because some organizations are designed to fail. For a company to achieve its potential, each employee's supply of organizational resources should equal the demand, and the same balance must apply to every business unit and to the company as a whole. To carry out his or her job, each employee has to know the answers to four basic questions: What resources do I control to accomplish my tasks? What measures will be used to evaluate my performance? Whom do I need to interact with and influence to achieve my goals? And how much support can I expect when I reach out to others for help? The questions correspond to what the author calls the four basic spans of a job--control, accountability, influence, and support. Each span can be adjusted so that it is narrow or wide or somewhere in between. If you get the settings right, you can design a job in which a talented individual can successfully execute on your company's strategy. If you get the settings wrong, it will be difficult for an employee to be effective. The first step is to set the span of control to reflect the resources allocated to each position and unit that plays an important role in delivering customer value. This setting, like the others, is determined by how the business creates value for customers and differentiates its products and services. Next, you can dial in different levels of entrepreneurial behavior and creative tension by widening or narrowing spans of accountability and influence. Finally, you must adjust the span of support to ensure that the job or unit will get the informal help it needs. This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. This product can be used with the free Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT), available at: hbsp.harvard.edu/jdot

Despite the enormous time and energy that goes into strategy development, many companies have little to show for their efforts. Indeed, research by the consultancy Marakon Associates suggests that companies on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise. In this article, Michael Mankins and Richard Steele of Marakon present the findings of this research. They draw on their experience with high-performing companies like Barclays, Cisco, Dow Chemical, 3M, and Roche to establish some basic rules for setting and delivering strategy: Keep it simple, make it concrete. Avoid long, drawn-out descriptions of lofty goals and instead stick to clear language describing what your company will and won't do. Debate assumptions, not forecasts. Create cross-functional teams drawn from strategy, marketing, and finance to ensure the assumptions underlying your long-term plans reflect both the real economics of your company's markets and its actual performance relative to competitors. Use a rigorous analytic framework. Ensure that the dialogue between the corporate center and the business units about market trends and assumptions is conducted within a rigorous framework, such as that of "profit pools." Discuss resource deployments early. Create more realistic forecasts and more executable plans by discussing up-front the level and timing of critical deployments. Clearly identify priorities. Prioritize tactics so that employees have a clear sense of where to direct their efforts. Continuously monitor performance. Track resource deployment and results against plan, using continuous feedback to reset assumptions and reallocate resources. Reward and develop execution capabilities. Motivate and develop staff. Following these rules strictly can help narrow the strategy-to-performance gap.

When we do our best work as leaders, we don't imitate others. Rather, we draw on our own values and capabilities. We enter what author Robert Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership. This is a frame of mind we tend to adopt when facing a significant challenge: a promotion opportunity, the risk of professional failure, a serious illness, a divorce, the death of a loved one, or any other major life jolt. Crisis calls, and we rise to the occasion. But we don't need to spend time in the dark night of the soul to reach this fundamental state. We can make the shift at any time by asking ourselves--and honestly answering--four transformative questions: Am I results centered? (Am I willing to leave my comfort zone to make things happen?) Am I internally directed? (Am I behaving according to my values rather than bending to social or political pressures?) Am I other focused? (Am I putting the collective good above my own needs?) Am I externally open? (Am I receptive to outside stimuli that may signal the need for change?) When we can answer these questions in the affirmative, we're prepared to lead in the truest sense. Of course, we can't sustain the fundamental state of leadership indefinitely. Fatigue and external resistance pull us out of it. But each time we reach it, we then return to our everyday selves a bit more capable, and we usually boost the performance of the people around us. Over time, we create a high-performance culture--and one that can be sustained.

The U.S. Army's Opposing Force (OPFOR) is a 2,500-member brigade whose job is to help prepare soldiers for combat. Created to be the meanest, toughest foe that soldiers will ever face, OPFOR engages units-in-training in a variety of mock campaigns under a wide range of conditions. Every month, a fresh brigade of more than 4,000 soldiers takes on this standing enemy. OPFOR, which is stationed in the California desert, always has the home-court advantage. But the force being trained--called BLUFOR--is numerically and technologically superior. It possesses more resources and better, more available data. It is made up of experienced soldiers. And it knows just what to expect, because OPFOR shares its methods from previous campaigns with BLUFOR's commanders. In short, each BLUFOR brigade is given practically every edge. Yet OPFOR almost always wins. Underlying OPFOR's consistent success is the way it uses the after action review (AAR), a method for extracting lessons from one event or project and applying them to others. AAR meetings became a popular business tool after Shell Oil began experimenting with them in 1998. Most corporate AARs, however, are faint echoes of the rigorous reviews performed by OPFOR. Companies tend to treat the process as a pro-forma wrap-up, drawing lessons from an action but rarely learning them. OPFOR's AARs, by contrast, generate raw material that is fed back into the execution cycle. And while OPFOR's reviews extract numerous lessons, the brigade does not consider a lesson to be learned until it is successfully applied and validated. It might not make sense for companies to adopt OPFOR's AAR processes in their entirety, but four fundamentals are mandatory: Lessons must benefit the team that extracts them; the AAR process must start at the beginning of the activity; lessons must link explicitly to future actions; and leaders must hold everyone, especially themselves, accountable for learning.

Corporate leaders seeking to boost growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the Linux open-source software community. Linux is developed by an essentially volunteer, self-organizing community of thousands of programmers. Most leaders would sell their grandmothers for workforces that collaborate as efficiently, frictionlessly, and creatively as the self-styled Linux hackers. But Linux is software, and software is hardly a model for mainstream business. The authors have, nonetheless, found surprising parallels between the anarchistic, caffeinated, hirsute world of Linux hackers and the disciplined, tea-sipping, clean-cut world of Toyota engineering. Specifically, Toyota and Linux operate by rules that blend the self-organizing advantages of markets with the low transaction costs of hierarchies. In place of markets' cash and contracts and hierarchies' authority are rules about how individuals and groups work together (with rigorous discipline); how they communicate (widely and with granularity); and how leaders guide them toward a common goal (by example). Those rules, augmented by simple communication technologies and a lack of legal barriers to sharing information, create rich common knowledge, the ability to organize teams modularly, extraordinary motivation, and high levels of trust, which radically lowers transaction costs. Low transaction costs, in turn, make it profitable for organizations to perform more and smaller transactions--and so increase the pace and flexibility typical of high-performance organizations. After the system achieves critical mass, it feeds on itself. The larger the system, the more broadly shared the knowledge, language, and work style. The greater individuals' reputational capital, the louder the applause and the stronger the motivation. The success of Linux is evidence of the power of that virtuous circle. Toyota's success is evidence that it is also powerful in conventional companies.

If sales and service organizations are to improve, they must learn to measure and manage the quality of the employee-customer encounter. Quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, but they're less useful when it comes to human interactions. To address this problem, the authors have developed a quality improvement approach they refer to as Human Sigma. It weaves together a consistent method for assessing the employee-customer encounter and a disciplined process for managing and improving it. There are several core principles for measuring and managing the employee-customer encounter: It's important not to think like an economist or an engineer when assessing interactions because emotions inform both sides' judgments and behavior. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed locally, because there are enormous variations in quality at the work-group and individual levels. And to improve the quality of the employee-customer interaction, organizations must conduct both short-term, transactional interventions and long-term, transformational ones. Employee engagement and customer engagement are intimately connected--and, taken together, they have an outsized effect on financial performance. They, therefore, need to be managed holistically. That is, the responsibility for measuring and monitoring the health of employee-customer relationships must reside within a single organizational structure, with an executive champion who has the authority to initiate and manage change. Nevertheless, the local manager remains the single most important factor in local group performance. A local manager whose work group shows suboptimal performance should be encouraged to conduct interventions, such as targeted training, performance reviews, action learning, and individual coaching.

Managing a traditional team seems pretty straightforward: Gather up whoever's available, give them time and space to do their jobs, and make sure they all play nicely together. But these teams produce results that are often as unremarkable as the teams themselves. When big change and high performance are required, a virtuoso team is far more likely to deliver outstanding and innovative results. Virtuoso teams are fundamentally different from the garden-variety work groups that most organizations form to pursue more modest goals. They comprise the top experts in their particular fields, are specially convened for ambitious projects, work with frenetic rhythm, and emanate a discernible energy. Not surprisingly, however, the superstars who make up these teams are renowned for being elitist, temperamental, egocentric, and difficult to work with. As a result, many managers fear that if they force such people to interact on a high-stakes project, the group just might implode. In this article, Bill Fischer and Andy Boynton put the inner workings of highly successful virtuoso teams on full display through three examples: the creative group behind West Side Story, the team of writers for Sid Caesar's 1950s-era television hit Your Show of Shows, and the high-powered technologists who averted an investor relations crisis for Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian energy giant. Each of these teams accomplished enormous goals and changed their businesses, their customers, even their industries. And they did so by breaking all the conventional rules of collaboration--from the way they recruited the best members to the way they enforced their unusual processes and from the high expectations they held to the exceptional results they produced.