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Can Lean Manufacturing Put an End to Sweatshops?

Harvard Business Review

Producers in less-developed countries compete by keeping costs low. It involves replacing traditional mass manufacturing with “lean manufacturing” principles. Workers specialize in simple, highly routinized operations. They are incentivized to complete operations as quickly as possible. Insight Center.

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B-Schools Aren’t Bothering to Produce HR Experts

Harvard Business Review

companies were making progress on the operations front, but now they seem to have lost their way—and business schools are in a position to help set them right again. In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. A few decades ago, U.S.

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A Brief History of the Ways Companies Compete

Harvard Business Review

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.

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Why American Management Rules the World

Harvard Business Review

We have developed a tool to measure management practices across operational management, monitoring, targets, and people management. In contrast, developing countries like Brazil, China, and India lag at the bottom of the management charts. Japanese, German, and Swedish firms follow closely behind. does not guarantee success.

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

Harvard Business Review

Develop deep expertise — your best risk-mitigation strategy . The most important way to mitigate risk is to become excellent at either engineering, product, selling, or operations and management. Lean Product Development and Customer Development processes) decreases the chance of a startup’s failure.

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Does Your Leadership Flunk the Testing Test?

Harvard Business Review

The organizational and operational benefits of targeted testing are not. But far too few organizations use targeted tests to simultaneously learn and accelerate the development process. "To do all of them at one time without testing the first one — you have to question what kind of strategy that is.".

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Britain’s Patient-Safety Crisis Holds Lessons for All

Harvard Business Review

As we in the United States juggle major structural and operational changes and try to secure our financial systems as revenues fall, we must keep our promise of safety and high quality to every patient, every time. Health Leadership Operations' As the report makes clear from the outset, there are lessons for all leaders in this story.

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