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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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B-Schools Aren’t Bothering to Produce HR Experts

Harvard Business Review

In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. That would never fly in marketing, operations research, or even accounting, where academics are all over new developments. A few decades ago, U.S. Let me explain. So schools need to step up.

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Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

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? Look at the variance of your new-market products.

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Can Lean Manufacturing Put an End to Sweatshops?

Harvard Business Review

The conventional wisdom has ranged from skepticism that lean could be successfully applied in places like Vietnam and India, to the hypothesis that lean actually exposes workers to greater risk of exploitation and injury than mass manufacturing. Insight Center. Operations in a Connected World. Sponsored by Accenture.

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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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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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Why American Management Rules the World

Harvard Business Review

They make more money, grow faster, have far higher stock market values, and survive for longer. markets generate the type of rapid management evolution that allows only the best-managed firms to survive. has more flexible labor markets. For details see our previous HBR blog post.). The American Management Century. But the U.S.