Showing papers in "Harvard Business Review in 1994"

Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work

Abstract: Outstanding service organizations focus on customers and frontline workers The service-profit chain puts hard values on soft measures, helping managers quantify their investments in people and then integrate those measures into a comprehensive service picture

The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning

Abstract: When strategic planning arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, corporate leaders embraced it as “the one best way” to devise and implement strategies that would enhance the competitiveness of each business unit. True to the scientific management pioneered by Frederick Taylor, this one best way involved separating thinking from doing and creating a new function staffed by specialists: strategic planners. Planning systems were expected to produce the best strategies as well as step-by-step instructions for carrying out those strategies so that the doers, the managers of businesses, could not get them wrong. As we now know, planning has not exactly worked out that way.

Managing for Organizational Integrity.

Abstract: Leadership styles can and will vary from leader to leader but adherence to certain key principles cannot. Leaders must put employees on clear notice of organizational standards. Those standards must then be consistently enforced. Disciplinary sanctions must be consistent and proportionate. In certain key respects, supervision cannot vary from supervisor to supervisor; overarching consistency must be maintained from workgroup to workgroup. This requires a systemic approach to what historically was left to individual supervisory and managerial discretions. The program shows the need for organizational solutions to organizational problems. It reminds senior leadership – the “big picture” people – of the vital need still to mind the store and keep close watch on the “little” things. If you take care of problems while they’re small, you don’t get a lot of big problems. Program theme: Finding True North. A WORKSHOP ON CREATING AND MAINTAINING A ‘WELL-DISCIPLINED’ ORGANIZATION

From lean production to the lean enterprise

Abstract: In our book The Machine That Changed the World, we explained how companies can dramatically improve their performance by embracing the \"lean production\" approacb pioneered by Toyota. By eliminating unnecessary steps, aligning all steps in an activity in a continuous flow, recombining labor tivities is not the end of the road. If individual breakthroughs can he linked up and down the value chain to form a continuous value stream that creates, sells, and services a family of products, the performance of the whole can be raised to a dramat-

Making competition in health care work.

Abstract: Health care reform in the United States is on a collision course with economic reality. Most proposals focus on measures that will produce one-time cost savings by eliminating waste and inefficiency. But the right question to ask is how to achieve dramatic and sustained cost reductions over time. What will it take to foster entirely new approaches to disease prevention and treatment, whole new ways to deliver services, and more cost-effective facilities? The answer lies in the powerful lessons business has learned over the past two decades about the imperatives of competition. In industry after industry, the underlying dynamic is the same: competition compels companies to deliver constantly increasing value to customers. The fundamental driver of this continuous quality improvement and cost reduction is innovation. Without incentives to sustain innovation in health care, short-term cost savings will soon be overwhelmed by the desire to widen access, the growing health needs of an aging population, and the unwillingness of Americans to settle for anything less than the best treatments available. The misguided assumption underlying much of the debate about health care is that technology is the enemy. By assuming that technology drives up costs, reformers neglect the central importance of innovation or, worse yet, attempt to slow its pace. In fact, innovation, driven by rigorous competition, is the key to successful reform.

Spend a day in the life of your customers

Abstract: E very successful business is built on superior senses—of timing, opportunity, responsibility, and, not infrequently, humor. None, however, is more critical than the ability to sense the market. A senior executive’s instinctive capacity to empathize with and gain insights from customers is the single most important skill he or she can use to direct technologies, product and service offerings, communications programs, indeed, all elements of a company’s strategic posture. Bill Gates, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, and others brought this ability to the enterprises they founded. Without it, their ventures might have been short-lived or at least far less successful.