Costs tend to rise in all organizations unless managers and their staffs have the motivation and skill to control them. Professor emeritus J. Ronald Fox analyzes this phenomenon during 50 years of US military overspending.
Offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and related activities to China and other emerging economies is changing the competitive landscape in many industries. Some predict that lessons learned by emerging market firms in their role as suppliers to major branded producers will allow them to develop the capabilities necessary to become viable world-class competitors, possibly at the expense of current market leaders. In this paper Juan Alcacer and Joanne Oxley subject this "learning by supplying" hypothesis to the test, analyzing data on evolving technological and marketing capabilities of suppliers in the mobile handset industry. Contrary to some of the more alarmist commentary in the popular press, the researchers' observations suggest that the progression from trusted supplier to threatening competitor among electronics manufacturing firms is far from inevitable. Findings also point to the existence of quite distinct pathways to technological and market learning for suppliers. The divergent learning outcomes for suppliers serving operators and branded producers reinforce the idea that, while operators involve suppliers in all aspects of production, branded producers strictly limit access to customer-facing activities, thus reducing suppliers' opportunities for learning in this domain.
Analyzing the e-mails of some 30,000 workers, Professor Toby E. Stuart and colleague Adam M. Kleinbaum dissected the communication networks of HQ staffers at a large, multidivisional company to get a better understanding of what a corporate headquarters does, and why it does it.
This paper investigates the practice of bundling as a product strategy, and identifies how consumers make choices between products and bundles in a dynamic environment. Authors Timothy Derdenger and Vineet Kumar look at the handheld video game market to study bundling in a platform setting with the goal of investigating several key questions of interest to practitioners who make product decisions: First, do consumers value bundles over and beyond their component products, indicating a synergy, which some researchers have hypothesized? Second, have there been differing opinions on whether mixed bundling, that is offering both the bundle and individual products for sale, is more effective than offering only pure bundles or even compared to offering only the products for sale? Given the prevalence of bundling in technology markets, it is critical to understand whether bundling is more effective in environments with strong network effects or with weak network effects.
As the fundamental model for managing inventory under demand uncertainty, the newsvendor model has received significant research attention, but behavioral issues—the focus of this paper—have been less well studied. Nils Rudi and David Drake demonstrate how different aspects of the newsvendor model, a rather complex managerial decision setting, result in a combination of behavioral deviations from the normative solution prescribed within existing literature. The results can help managers prioritize order quantity improvements based on product margins and the degree of demand feedback available in the setting that they operate in.
As consumers become more aware of the health and environmental implications of how food is grown and produced, demand for local food has increased considerably. This paper examines the operational tradeoffs in fresh produce supply to gain insights on what drives the structure of the supply chain and how "local food" can become a viable sourcing strategy for a large retailer. HBS professor Deishin Lee and coauthors show that there are complementary operational synergies when retailers and farmers increase scale and specialize. This implies that when small farmers are capacity constrained, they can be squeezed out of the supply chain. Technological advances in farming practices, efficiency gains in transportation, and space constraints in retail stores result in supply chain members mutually benefitting from their decision to increase scale, leading to specialization. The study characterizes the conditions under which vertical differentiation and operational scope can increase the viability of the small local farmer. This paper contributes to work on supply chain design and environmental sustainability.
Business success in one geographic location doesn't necessarily follow a company to a new setting. Professor Juan Alcácer discusses the importance of taking a long-term strategic view.
Published in 2011
Managing a company's risks and opportunities associated with climate change—including its physical and regulatory implications—requires focusing not only on internal operations, but also on supply chains, especially since greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in supply chains typically exceed those from a company's own operations. But this requires obtaining climate change information from suppliers, which some are reluctant to share. In this paper, Chonnikarn (Fern) Jira and Michael W. Toffel examine proprietary data from the Carbon Disclosure Project's Supply Chain Project, a collaboration of multinational corporations asking their key suppliers to share information about their GHG emissions and their vulnerabilities and opportunities associated with climate change. Jira and Toffel find evidence that a supplier is more likely to share this information when it faces several buyers requesting the information, when its buyers appear committed to actually using this information, and when the supplier is in a relatively competitive industry and is thus particularly vulnerable to being replaced by its rivals. These findings can help managers better predict which suppliers will be more willing to share climate change information, and which might require more incentives or pressure to share this information.
Every manufacturing process leaves waste, but Assistant Professor Deishin Lee believes much of this left-behind material can be put to productive—and profitable—use.
The H-1B visa program, which enables US employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers for three years, is "a lightning rod for a very heated debate," says Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. His latest research addresses the question of whether the program is good for innovation, and whether it impacts jobs for Americans.
Why might firms make operational decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits? This model looks at the question by developing scenarios using the example of inventory management in the face of an external investor. The research was conducted by Vishal Gaur of Cornell University, Richard Lai of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ananth Raman and William Schmidt of Harvard Business School.
Scholars have intensely studied the similarities and differences between organizations that are decentralized in their decision making versus those favoring more command-and-control central authority. What leads to a firm following a decentralized approach, and can that approach be predicted? Professor Kristina McElheran advances previous, largely theoretical, research on this subject to explore in the real world the economic determinants affecting how IT purchasing authority in 3,000 multi-establishment companies was allocated between central headquarters and outlying establishments.
In practice, many large firms are now realizing the importance of humanism in corporate management. But in academia, much of management theory is still stuck on the ideas of early industrialization - focusing solely on the idea that the only real value is financial value. In this paper, Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses how social logic guides the practices of many high-performing companies. Kanter suggests that such successful practices should provoke the creation of new economic theory, which will in turn provoke other firms to take note. She puts forth several propositions to make the case.
The recent natural disaster in Japan brought to light the fragile nature of the global supply chain. Professor Willy Shih discusses how companies should be thinking about their supply-chain strategy now.
Instead of treating low-paid staffers as commodities, a new breed of retailers such as QuikTrip assigns them more responsibility and invests in their development, says professor Zeynep Ton. The result? Happy customers and even happier employees.
The Obama administration and US companies do not have to wait for Japanese suppliers to recover from earthquake damage, argues Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Action can be taken now to ensure that America invests in growing our domestic stock of world-class suppliers.
Harvard Business School faculty share their views and insights about the challenges that lie ahead for Japan's business leaders and for global companies operating there.
Published in 2010
Data.gov is a young initiative of President Barack Obama for making raw data available on the Web. In an HBS executive education class for technology specialists, professor Karim Lakhani and the US Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, sparked dialogue about new routes to innovation.
"Supply learning" is the process by which customers predict a company's ability to fulfill product orders in the future using information about how well the company fulfilled orders in the past. A new paper investigates how and whether a customer's assumptions about future supplier performance will affect the likelihood that the customer will order from that supplier in the future. Research, based on data from apparel manufacturer Hugo Boss, was conducted by Nathan Craig and Ananth Raman of Harvard Business School, and Nicole DeHoratius of the University of Portland.
Boredom and fatigue often hamper the productivity of workers whose jobs consist of repeating the same tasks. This paper explores ways in which companies can combat this problem, introducing the idea of the "restart effect" - a deliberate disruption that kindles productivity. Research, which focused on a loan-application processing line at a Japanese bank, was conducted by HBS professor Francesca Gino and Kenan-Flagler Business School assistant professor Bradley R. Staats.
