Stories
Stories
Engines of Innovation
edited by Richard S. Rosenbloom and William J. Spencer
(HBS Press)
In past decades, industrial laboratories such as AT&T's Bell Labs and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center were wellsprings of powerful new technologies critical to America's global competitiveness. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, competitive pressures have forced managers to reassess industrial research as a business priority.
In Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, editors Richard Rosenbloom, the School's David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration, and William Spencer, president and CEO of Sematech, bring together top technical managers from Alcoa, IBM, Intel, and Xerox and leading scholars of the history and economics of technological change. The result is an important discussion of the consequences of declining investment in research for industry and the economy as a whole. The authors, who include HBS professor Dorothy Leonard-Barton and Rosenbloom, explore new ideas for linking research with commercial markets and identify the policy choices for industry, government, and universities as together they shape the future of industrial research.
Broken Promises
by D. Quinn Mills and G. Bruce Friesen
(HBS Press)
What happened to IBM? That is the question posed by authors Quinn Mills, the School's Albert J. Weatherhead, Jr., Professor of Business Administration, and Bruce Friesen (MBA '85), knowledge manager in the Enterprise Transformation Initiative at Arthur Andersen, in their new book, Broken Promises: An Unconventional View of What Went Wrong at IBM. Based on interviews with IBM executives, company records, and surveys of the company's customers, Broken Promises is a cautionary tale of strategic miscalculation, managerial error, and loss of confidence that demonstrates the risks of neglecting customer and employee relationships in the face of large-scale change.
Once the world's most admired corporation, IBM stumbled badly in the early 1990s. The company, now making a comeback, suffered at the depth of this crisis its first-ever operating loss and eliminated nearly 200,000 jobs. According to Mills and Friesen, the cause of IBM's difficulties, as is widely believed, was not that it had fallen behind in technology, but rather that the company had disregarded its customers and misled its employees. Broken Promises points to several key mistakes IBM made and suggests challenges that lie ahead for the company's current executives.
Co-opetition
by Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff
(Doubleday)
"Co-opetition" is a new business concept that goes beyond the old rules of competition and cooperation to combine advantages of both. In their new book, HBS associate professor Adam Brandenburger and Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management develop a five-part business strategy based on this concept. Drawing from the science of game theory, the authors show managers how they can profit and prosper by changing the way they think about customers, competition, cooperation, and the market.
Examples from companies such as Nintendo, American Express, Club Med, and General Motors provide ample evidence that long-term profitability does not require others to fail. Rather, these stories demonstrate that dozens of companies have been using the strategies of co-opetition not only to create "wins" for themselves, but to make it possible for their industry as a whole to grow.
Wise Choices
edited by Richard J. Zeckhauser, Ralph L. Keeney, and James K. Sebenius
(HBS Press)
To live is to make decisions, whether in organizations or as individuals. In Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, edited by HBS professor James Sebenius; Professor Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government; and Ralph Keeney, professor of systems management at the University of Southern California, leading scholars in economics, psychology, statistics, and decision theory grapple with strategic uncertainty and the question of how to make wise choices.
The 23 papers in this collection—which include those of HBS authors David Bell, Adam Brandenburger, Richard Meyer, John Pratt, and James Sebenius—address topics such as individual decision-making under uncertainty, games of strategy in which one player's actions directly influence an-other's welfare, and the process of forging negotiated agreements. The contributors also analyze decisions regarding personal medical problems, business investments, public policy, and international diplomacy.
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