Industrial sector

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

When Ben Franklin wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac and the words, “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” he did not have price fixing in mind. To the 47 executives in companies in the folding-box industry convicted of price fixing, however, the words seem tailored to fit. In those companies convicted under antitrust laws in 1976, […]

Femtosecond lasers emit pulses of light that last just a millionth of a billionth of a second. These lasers enable surgery so precise that a single mitochondrion can be removed without harming the rest of the cell, and machining so controlled that structures can be micromachined within a piece of glass. Eric Mazur, a professor […]

The “bounded awareness” phenomenon causes people to ignore critical information when making decisions. Learning to expand the limits of your awareness before you make an important choice will save you from asking “How did I miss that?” after the fact.

Courtesy of my dear friend Peer Munck (Founder of MunckMix, a music distributor), I just had my first ride in a Tesla Roadster, the $129,000 electric sports car. It blew me away, because I was reminded what can happen when innovators lovingly create something that has design integrity — by which I mean the solution […]

For decades the difficulty of motivating salespeople has been frustrating sales and marketing managers. To the most effective ones, two things are clear: one, the job is difficult; two, there is no one simple solution. Believing that “good salespeople are born, not made,” many managers recognize that recruiting is important. Others holding that “if you […]

At this large GM plant the union and management jointly seek to change the meaning of work itself

Lessons from an engineering and construction company.

What do Toyota’s sudden-acceleration woes and the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have in common? Both are examples of a type of organizational breakdown that is destined, absent some fundamental rethinking of what “leadership” means, to become ever more common and damaging: complex systems failures triggered by seeming rational patterns of cost-reduction […]

An eight-step process to help companies learn to cope creatively with large and complex selling tasks—and have lasting results.

Drivers can't have too much or too little faith in self-driving cars.

Strategic dreams often turn into nightmares if companies start engaging in expensive and distracting restructurings. It’s far more effective to choose a design that works reasonably well, then develop a strategic system to tune the structure to the strategy.

When the author agreed to accept the top job at UPS, the global shipping service, in late winter of 2019, she expected to steer the company toward a brighter...

A review of the research on automation.

High-definition televisions (HDTVs) should, by now, be a huge success. Philips, Sony, and Thompson invested billions of dollars to develop TV sets with...

Different metro areas will need different solutions.

Slashing regulations that protect health and the environment could backfire in the long run.

It's at the heart of larger concerns about competitiveness and mobility.

For too long, boardrooms have practiced strategy as theater. But those days are over. To explain, consider the sad case of Pontiac. Poor Pontiac, says the New York Times, died of “indifference.” They’re right, but the real question is: why? GM’s managers decided that Pontiacs could be merely marketed as exciting and a tiny bit […]

We spend a disproportionate share of our money on housing, health care, and education.