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Compete on Know-Why, Not Know-How

Harvard Business Review

They get stuck making incremental improvements that are rooted in existing competencies, markets, and business models. The real trick is that even if competitors can eventually understand your core insight, their ability to respond is often constrained by their own competencies, customers, and business model.

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Bureaucracy Must Die

Harvard Business Review

Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success. We argued that a business should be seen as a portfolio of “core competencies” as well as a portfolio of products. Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR , C.K. Managers assess performance. Architecture.

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article thumbnail

Bureaucracy Must Die

Harvard Business Review

Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success. We argued that a business should be seen as a portfolio of “core competencies” as well as a portfolio of products. Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR , C.K. Managers assess performance. Architecture.

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End the Religion of ROE

Harvard Business Review

DuPont sent Donaldson Brown, a promising engineer-turned-finance staffer, to Detroit to sort things out, and sort them out he did. Similarly, production engineers treated their factories royally and their labor as expendable, until unions and labor laws intervened. That value must be measured across all stakeholders. As the late C.

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