In business today, all advantage is temporary. In order to
survive-let alone thrive-companies must be able to anticipate and
adapt to change, or face rapid, brutal extinction. In Clockspeed,
Charles Fine draws on a decades worth of research at M. I. T. s
Sloan School of Management to introduce a new vocabulary for
understanding the forces of competition and making strategic
decisions that will determine the destiny of your company, as well
as your industry. Taking inspiration from the world of biology,
Fine argues that each industry has its own evolutionary life cycle
or clockspeed, measured by the rate at which it introduces new
products, processes, and organizational structures. Just as
geneticists study the fruit fly to gain insight into the
evolutionary paths of all animals, managers in any industry can
learn from the industrial fruit flies-such as Internet services,
personal computers, and multimedia entertainment-which evolve
through new generations at breakneck speed. Applying the lessons of
the fruit flies to industries as diverse as bicycles,
pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, Fine illustrates how
competitive advantage is lost or gained by how well a company
manages dynamic web of relationships that run throughout its chain
of suppliers, distributors, and alliance partners. Packed with
revolutionary concepts and tools to help managers make key
strategic decisions that affect current and future performance,
Clockspeed shows, as no other book before it, how the ultimate core
competency is mastering the art of supply chain design, carefully
choosing which components and capabilities to keep in-house and
which to purchase from outside. The consequences of faulty of
visionary decisions can be enormous and dramatic. Witness the case
of IBM in the early 1980s, when it outsourced key PC components to
Microsoft and Intel, unleashing the Intel Inside phenomenon and a
complete restructuring of the computer industry. Going further,
Fine sees the personal computer as merely a component in the vast
information-entertainment industry, which evolves at speeds
unimagined a few years ago. He uses this fruit fly as well to peer
into the future of industrial evolution and find practical advice
for players in all industries, from automobiles to health care
information systems. Clockspeed not only serves up some new laws of
value chain dynamics, but it also offers recommendations for
achieving industry leadership through simultaneous product,
process, and supply chain design. In challenging managers to think
like corporate geneticists Clockspeed contributes the next creative
leap in business strategy.
關於作者:
Charles H. Fine is a professor of management and director of the
Technology Supply Chain Research Project at the Sloan School of
Management, MIT. He has conducted extensive research on the
dynamics of technology management, supply chain design, and
industry competitiveness, and has consulted to major corporations,
including GM, Corning, Lockheed, and Intel.