September–October 1999
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Organigraphs: Drawing How Companies Really Work
Magazine ArticleA creative new approach to org charts helps managers see critical relationships—and competitive opportunities, too.
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Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People
Magazine ArticleIn these days of talent wars, the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves—and then use that information to customize the careers of their dreams.
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Good Cause, Good Business
Magazine ArticleA pioneer of cause-related marketing explains how to make it pay off—for the company and for the charity.
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Go Downstream: The New Profit Imperative in Manufacturing
Magazine ArticleNow that providing services is more lucrative than making products, the old foundations for success in manufacturing are crumbling. Smart manufacturers are creating new business models to capture profits at the customer’s end of the value chain.
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Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System
HBR BestsellerThe Toyota story has been intensively researched and painstakingly documented, yet what really happens inside the company remains a mystery. Here’s new insight into the unspoken rules that give Toyota its competitive edge.
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Visualizing Innovation
Magazine ArticleA new mapping technique reveals patterns and suggests strategies.
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Creating Breakthroughs at 3M
Magazine ArticleCompanies say they want breakthrough products, but most are far more adept at making incremental improvements to existing lines. A pioneering division at 3M successfully navigated a process that leads to breakthrough thinking.
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Under the Big Top
Magazine ArticleThe artistic director of the Big Apple Circus knows a thing or two about managing diverse teams.
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Capturing the Real Value in High-Tech Acquisitions
Magazine ArticleMany high-tech companies looking for hot new products have caught acquisition fever. Smart buyers keep their eye on building the right long-term capabilities, which often means keeping the right people.
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The Rise and Fall of the J. Peterman Company
Magazine ArticleWith a keen eye and a flair for romantic copy, John Peterman created a successful catalog company. As an entrepreneur, he was in his element. As top manager of a fast-growing enterprise, he was ultimately much less successful. What happened?
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Bringing Silicon Valley Inside
Magazine ArticleIn Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.
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The New Meaning of Quality in the Information Age
Magazine ArticleA company’s software is becoming a critical source of competitive advantage and competitive risk. Yet few managers can agree on the key variables for judging its quality. Here’s a new framework for doing just that.
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Betting on the Future: The Virtues of Contingent Contracts
Magazine ArticleMany negotiations collapse over differences of opinion about how the future will unfold. Companies need to realize that it’s often better to bet on uncertain events than to argue about them.
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Rhetoric and Reality: Making Sense of the Income Gap Debate
Magazine ArticleThe new economy has brought prosperity to many, but not to all. If the income gap continues to widen, politicians will take action—and business will bear the brunt.
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A Question of Character
Magazine ArticleJoe Ryan turned a small-town cosmetics company into a national powerhouse, making employees happy and shareholders rich in the process. Does it really matter that he cheats on his wife?
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Pioneering Distance Education in Africa
Magazine ArticleThe World Bank’s African Virtual University is bringing knowledge to an undereducated continent—via satellite.
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A New Way to Manage Process Knowledge
Magazine ArticleThe products of an ambitious MIT study could help you reshape your business.
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Forethought
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Ideas at Work
Forethought
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First Person
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Manager’s Tool Kit
Books in Review
HBR Case Study
Forethought
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Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System
HBR BestsellerThe Toyota production system is a paradox. On the one hand, every activity, connection, and production flow in a Toyota factory is rigidly scripted. Yet at the same time, Toyota’s operations are enormously flexible and responsive to customer demand. How can that be? After an extensive four-year study of the system in more than 40 plants, the authors came to understand that at Toyota it’s the very rigidity of the operations that makes the flexibility possible. That’s because the company’s operations can be seen as a continuous series of controlled experiments. Whenever Toyota defines a specification, it is establishing a hypothesis that is then tested through action. This approach – the scientific method – is not imposed on workers, it’s engrained in them. And it stimulates them to engage in the kind of experimentation that is widely recognized as the cornerstone of a learning organization. The Toyota Production System grew out of the workings of the company over 50 years, and it has never actually been written down. Making the implicit explicit, the authors lay out four principles that show how Toyota sets up all its operations as experiments and teaches the scientific method to its workers. The first rule governs the way workers do their work. The second, the way they interact with one another. The third governs how production lines are constructed. And the last, how people learn to improve. Every activity, connection, and production path designed according to these rules must have built-in tests that signal problems immediately. And it is the continual response to those problems that makes this seemingly rigid system so flexible and adaptive to changing circumstances.
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