Showing posts with label outsourcing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label outsourcing. Show all posts

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction And Dynamic Specialization Review

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction And Dynamic Specialization
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The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction And Dynamic Specialization ReviewIf you feel that you miss (...), Enron and the other excesses of the the late 90's, please buy this book. Otherwise, don't.
Hagel and Brown are two well pedigreed authors, and they attempt to explain their view on what is the next frontier in corporate strategy. The answer is that value of the firm lies not inside the firm but at its edge. The edge is a broad metaphor for geography (India, China and Brazil), maturity (old econ and new economy), physical edge (inside the firm as well the partners outside).
The key insights from this book are
-Two types of forces have converged to squeeze margins -Informational technology, and Public policy shifts. Try telling this to the 500,000 people who have lost their jobs in the valley.
-Three key elements of the new model for business strategy are
-A. Reconveive sources of strategic advantages by accelerated capability building across boundaries. This implies - Dynamic specialization, Connection and Coordination of 3rd parties and Leveraged capability building. Elaborated using the Li & Fung, Hong Kong retailer example.
-B. Master new mechanisms to build advantages - This implies focusing on efficiency as well as effectiveness, process outsourcing and offshoring, loose coupling of extended business processes and production friction
-C. Adopt new approaches for developing strategy
-Given this framework, conduct a diagnostic that inventories the key initiatives for the last 12 months, as well as the proposed initiatives for the next 5 years. At the end of this diagnostic, you should be able to identify what activities you can offshore and outsource and therefore you can dynamically specialize.
-Process networks is predicated on loose coupling of processes and Productive friction. Productive friction can be decomposed into four factors, Performance Metrics, People, Prototypes, and Pattern Recognition.
-Process networks are enabled by performance fabrics and IT is critical in achieving a solid performance fabric. Web services is critical in implementing this new fabric.
Hagel and Brown have transformed a solid Harvard Business Review paper into a 200 page book that does not do sufficient justice to the expended ink. The approach is geared towards policy wonks at think-tanks rather than day-to-day business manager trying to compete in a flattening world. The authors do not provide prescriptive advise that can be implemented easily. Their case examples are shallow and do not reflect the points well. I would have preferred if the authors take their core argument and apply it to a business unit within a Fortune 500 organization and experiment with their strategy before writing this book.
To the busy executive, one less book that is cluttering our target reading lists.
Your searching for practical strategic ideas,
Fred "Grounding" Sanford
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India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Global Culture Review

India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Global Culture
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India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Global Culture ReviewIndia is emerging as the most important provider of IT in the world, the Indian IT industry today is where the Japanese automotive industry was in 1960 - the core people, companies, practices and educational institutions that will change our world are in place.
This book is the best introduction I have found to the Indian IT industry (I have several others on order) and it makes a good companion to India Unbound by Gurcharan Das and The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen.
The strength of this book is that it covers cultural, political and business issues. One needs an appreciation for all three to understand just how massive the change we are seeing in India really is. The book has good review chapters on India's evolution from the Raj, to the License Raj, to the reforms of 1991. There are some interesting thoughts on the history and role of English in India and at the end of the book there is a fascinating chapter on the role that the Indian invention of the number zero plays in the marketing of India as a center for IT. Her thoughts on the role of the periphery in cultural innovation are import valuable, as are the comments on the importance of third-world markets to disruptive technologies.
The various flavors in the book are not always well integrated. The author could probably have thought about this book, read more deeply, and met more people before writing, but the book is timely. The author now lives part of the year in Shanghai (according to the blurb), so we can expect more valuable books from her in the future.
The book does not cover a number of key areas, which I note here so that other authors can explore these and provide us with some books.
The author quotes an Indian executive as saying that India has innovated in the area of software process rather than core algorithms, coding or products. Possibly true. India has done an excellent job implementing the SEI CMM (Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model) and in using UML (the Unified Modeling Language). The nature of India's process innovations and the role that CMM and UML play needs to be better understood. A parallel could be the role that Deming and quality management played in the Japanese automobile industry.
It is hard to get a real feeling for the people in the industry. We need a book of interviews with the key players in the India IT industry.
Last year I was at a strategic think tank with a Fortune 50 company. The company's management coach attended and was from Bangalore. She had some very interesting thoughts on the impact the IT industry has had on the local culture and the relationships between parents and children, especially young women. An investigation of the social and cultural implications of the IT revolution for India would also make a good book.
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