STAYING POWER: Six Enduring Principles For Manag

As we move into an era of simultaneous innovation and commoditization, enabled by digital technologies, managers around the world are asking themselves how can we both adapt to rapid changes in technology and markets, and still make enough money to survive - and thrive? To provide answers to some of these important and urgent questions, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Michael Cusumano draws on nearly 30 years of research into the practices of global corporations that have been acknowledged leaders and benchmark setters - Toyota in manufacturing, and Microsoft, Intel, Google, Apple, and others in software, internet services, and consumer electronics. If we look deeply enough, he contends, we can see the ideas that underpin the management practices that make for great companies, and drive their strategic development and innovation. From his deep knowledge of these organizations, Cusumano distils six core principles that he believes have been - in various combinations - crucial to their strategy, innovation management practices, and ability to deal with change and uncertainty. The first two principles - platforms, not just products, and services, for product firms - are relatively new and broader ways of thinking about strategy and business models, based on Cusumano's latest research. The other four - capabilities, the pull concept, economies of scope, and flexibility - all contribute to agility, which is a mix of flexibility and speed. Some practices associated with these ideas, such as dynamic capabilities, just-in-time production, iterative or prototype-driven product development, flexible manufacturing, modular architectures, and component reuse, are now commonly regarded as standard best practices.