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Breaking the Death Grip of Legacy Technologies

Harvard Business Review

Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers. Why are older incumbent firms slow to adopt new technologies even when the economic or strategic benefits are clear?

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Innovating the Toyota, and YouTube, Way

Harvard Business Review

In terms of people, processes and technologies, Toyota and Google's YouTube have little in common. The more deeply Jim's essays discussed the nature of supplier relationships, work-flow and value creation in lean enterprise, the keener the connection with YouTube's Space. They don't just partner; they provide resources that add value.

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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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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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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. The technologies and processes that are transforming companies. Insight Center.

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The Coherent Conglomerate

Harvard Business Review

2 in its market; he also insisted that every business provide value no competitor could match, and that they all should be able to gain leverage from GE's distinctive strength in complex, engineering-intensive industrial enterprises — or they wouldn't fit. We have seen the market penalize that approach.

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Please, Can We All Just Stop "Innovating"?

Harvard Business Review

There's something about the culture of business that tends toward excess — in financial markets, to be sure, but also in the "market" for new ideas and management techniques. How can we apply what we've always been great at to markets or customer segments we've never worked with?