STRATEGIC OPERATIONS: Competing Through Capabilities

About this book

Designed for the second year elective opted by a third of the student body at the Harvard Business School Hayes Pisano and Upton break new ground in this text/casebook by emphasizing the manufacturing process itself as a competitive weapon. Today companies typically adopt one or more of a growing number of improvement programs such as TQM (Total Quality Management) JIT (Just-in-Time) production and DFM (Design for Manufacturability).The majority of these improvement efforts according to recent surveys have not been successful. By pinning their hopes on a few best-practice approaches managers implicitly abandon the central concept of a strategy in favor of a generic approach to competitive success. In clear accessible prose the authors propose a new explanation for the problems companies face by specifying the kind of competitive advantage each company is seeking in its marketplace and articulates how that advantage is to be achieved.