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Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

When is it possible to predict a product’s success? 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?

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Innovating the Toyota, and YouTube, Way

Harvard Business Review

By sheer happenstance, I had just gotten a copy of Gemba Walks , a collection of essays by James Womack , a co-author of the automotive classic The Machine That Changed The World and a pioneering importer of Toyota-inspired lean production insights and methodologies to America. What does it mean for your company and industry?

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How Economists Got Income Inequality Wrong

Harvard Business Review

It says that markets determine wages, and any social or political tampering just creates inefficiency. In the 1990s, a whole subfield of economics reached "virtually unanimous agreement," as a survey in the Journal of Economic Perspectives noted , that in the context of technological change, markets themselves inevitably drove U.S.

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A Brief History of the Ways Companies Compete

Harvard Business Review

This was the original purpose of forming corporations — to facilitate the production of products and services with the least amount of wasted time, materials, and labor. Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production.

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Why American Management Rules the World

Harvard Business Review

Over the past decade, a team from Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford has systematically surveyed global management. They make more money, grow faster, have far higher stock market values, and survive for longer. has more flexible labor markets. The American Management Century.

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Founding a Company Doesn’t Have to be a Big Career Risk

Harvard Business Review

The most important way to mitigate risk is to become excellent at either engineering, product, selling, or operations and management. 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.

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India’s Secret to Low-Cost Health Care

Harvard Business Review

costs by using practices commonly associated with mass production and lean production. Moreover, when hospitals consolidate, the motive often is to increase market power vis-à-vis insurance companies, rather than to lower costs by creating a hub-and-spoke structure. Task Shifting. This innovation has also reduced costs.