Industry Clockspeed and Competency Chain Design: An Introductory Essay

Appeared in proceedings of the 1996 Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Conference, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire June 24-25, 1996, pp. TBA.This paper introduces the notion of industry clockspeed to classify industries by an aspect of their dynamic characteristics. The clockspeed framework suggests a dynamic theory of the firm where the "inner core" competency of an organization is the ability to continually design and assemble of chains of competencies to deliver value to the marketplace

The Vertical and Horizontal Distribution of Deep-Sea Crustaceans of the Order Euphausiacea (Malacostraca: Eucarida) from the northern Gulf of Mexico with notes on reproductive seasonality.

The vertical and horizontal distributions of Euphausiacea in the northern Gulf of Mexico, including the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, were analyzed from 340 trawl samples collected between April-June, 2011. This study is the first comprehensive survey of euphausiid distributions from depths deeper than 1000 m in the Gulf of Mexico and included stratified sampling from five discrete depth ranges (0-200 m, 200-600 m, 600-1000 m, 1000-1200 m, and 1200-1500 m). In addition, this study encompasses the region heavily impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Data presented here could potentially be used in ecosystem models investigating trophic effects of the spill because euphausiids are the preferred prey of a variety of higher trophic organisms. Lastly, these data represent the first quantification of euphausiid assemblages in this location after the Deepwater Horizon event and can serve as a basis of comparison against which to monitor recovery of the euphausiid assemblage after exposure to Deepwater Horizon hydrocarbons and dispersant in the water column

Is the Make-Buy Decision Process a Core Competence?

Many of today's products are so complex that no single company has all the necessary knowledge about either the product or the required processes to completely design and manufacture them in-house. As a result, most companies are dependent on others for crucial elements of their corporate well-being. Typically, however, companies have some choice as to whom they become dependent upon and for what sorts of skills and competences. That is, although few companies can "do it all," most have significant influence over the strategic choice of corporate identity and what businesses to be in. What is the range of choices they face? How are different companies making those choices? Can we make sense of the variety of decisions we can observe now in different industries or different parts of the world? What are the skills that companies must retain? In this paper we address the challenge of making these choices rationally. We give examples in which similar companies, facing similar choices, select make/buy patterns in very different ways, resulting in very different patterns of interdependencies along companies' supply chains. These choices are not restricted to skills related to the product, but include choices related to key design and manufacturing issues. To make sense of these differences, we propose a framework that ties together the following engineering and management concepts into one coherent view: 1) core competencies 2) the product development process 3) systems engineering 4) product architecture and modularity, and 5) supply chain design.ONR and various MIT programs including Leaders for Manufacturing, International Motor Vehicle Program, Industrial Performance Center, Japan Program, International Center for Management of Technology

Culture Clash: The Corporate Socialization Process Meets Non-Congruent Organization Subcultures

The literature on organization socialization suggests characteristics associated with strong organization culture. Key among these is a socialization process that emphasizes well-defined roles, rules, routines, and values; reinforcement with intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems; and conditioning experiences. That literature also suggests that an organization exhibiting a strong culture and socialization process will likely elicit participant behavior that is highly congruent with the espoused values and objectives stated by the organization. This paper uses a case study of General Motors' Saturn Corporation to suggest an enrichment of this theory. We argue that Saturn fulfills all the requirements of a strong culture and socialization process yet we find patterns of behavior seemingly at odds with the espoused values and objectives articulated in the environment. Co-existing with and within the strong corporate culture at Saturn, we found work group subcultures whose socialization processes can be just as strong as those at the corporate level but whose values suggest individual behaviors that conflict with those espoused at the corporate level. These observations lead us to suggest a model of culture-influenced behavior that explicitly addresses the existence of distinct subgroup cultures. Interestingly, the workgroup subcultures that generated behaviors at odds with the outcomes desired at the corporate level were encouraged by exactly those reward systems designed by Saturn to reinforce the espoused values of consensus decision-making at the workgroup level. Such observations underscore the complexity and subtlety involved in designing coherent organization-wide cultures and reinforcing mechanisms.MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program and Project Delta at the Sloan School of Management

Fitting Teams to the Task: Product Development Vs. Operations Improvement at Saturn and Nummi

In the automotive industry, Saturn and NUMMI are often touted as exemplars of successful implementation of manufacturing employee involvement. Building on data and extended on-site interviews, this paper explores the differences between the approaches taken at each plant and the relationship between worker involvement and plant performance. Based on this comparison, we offer a model to assess the fit between employee involvement activity emphasis (product development vs. operations improvement) and timescale of the involvement process.MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program and Project Delta at the Sloan School of Management

Dynamic Business Share Allocation in a Supply Chain with Competing Suppliers

This paper studies a repeated game between a manufacturer and two competing suppliers with imperfect monitoring. We present a principal-agent model for managing long-term supplier relationships using a unique form of measurement and incentive scheme. We measure a supplier's overall performance with a rating equivalent to its continuation utility (the expected total discounted utility of its future payoffs), and incentivize supplier effort with larger allocations of future business. We obtain the vector of the two suppliers' ratings as the state of a Markov decision process, and we solve an infinite horizon contracting problem in which the manufacturer allocates business volume between the two suppliers and updates their ratings dynamically based on their current ratings and the current performance outcome. Our contributions are both theoretical and managerial: we propose a repeated principal-agent model with a novel incentive scheme to tackle a common, but challenging, incentive problem in a multiperiod supply chain setting. Assuming binary effort choices and performance outcomes by the suppliers, we characterize the structure of the optimal contract through a novel fixed-point analysis. Our results provide a theoretical foundation for the emergence of “business-as-usual” (low effort) trapping states and tournament competition (high effort) recurrent states as the long-run incentive drivers for motivating critical suppliers

Technology Supply Chains: An Introductory Essay

This working paper was originally printed in the Working Paper Series of the MIT International Motor Vehicle Progra

The Role Of Proximity In Automotive Technology Supply Chain

Working Draft, 1995This essay is divided into the following sections: in section 1.1, we briefly argue that the auto industry is a compelling case for studying regional economic development and economic geography precisely because it generates large numbers of high-quality jobs, and forges tight linkages to production and jobs in upstream and downstream sectors. In section 2, we present the issues of production and place more systematically. Having established the importance of the issue of production and place in this introduction, we move on to frame the debate by defining two types of space over which public and private authorities have jurisdiction, and across which production and its attendant jobs are (re)located. We further define four types of proximity: geographic, organizational, cultural, and electronic, that plausibly contribute to the success of economic development. These kinds of proximity offer varied incentives and disincentives for industrial agglomeration, and therefore inspire competition between nations, states and regions for the location of production and jobs. Also in section 2, we introduce two issues that have remained largely unexplored in the literature on regional economic development and economic geography: the strategic interaction between and among firms and public authorities, and the question of production technology development and sourcing.MIT -- Leaders for Manufacturing, the International Motor Vehicle Program, the Industrial Performance Center, the International Center for Research on the Management of Technology, and the Japan Program -- as well as from Chrysler, Intel, Sematech, and Texas Instruments, is gratefully acknowledged

Technology Suuply Chains: An Introductory Essay

This essay addresses strategic technology sourcing -- the determination of what technologies are strategic to a firm (or nation) and the management of the policy options that follow from this determination. This work is certainly not the first word on this subject, nor will it be the last. In fact, we hope that it will stimulate significant discussion about strategic technology sourcing especially in those organizations where such discussion has been absent, naive, or just shouted down by the manage-by-the-numbers types. In the business press today, outsourcing is the rage. "Restructure and downsize your organization; outsource as many functions as possible" seems to be the message from many of the world's most profitable corporations -- large and small -- as well as their consultant-armies.MIT: Leaders for Manufacturing, the International Motor Vehicle Program, the Industrial Performance Center, the International Center for Research on the Management of Technology, and the Japan Program; Chrysler; Intel; Sematech; and Texas Instruments

eClockspeed-based Principles for Supply Chain Design

Presentation on eClockspeed-based principle