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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 decade's 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 a 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 or 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.
Charles H. Fine is Professor of Management
at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management and Codirector of
the M.I.T. International Motor Vehicle Program. A recognized
authority on the dynamics of technology management, supply
chain design, and industry competitiveness, he consults
to major corporations worldwide through http://www.clockspeed.com/.
This is his first book.
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