This evening I watched as Swedish culture programme Kobra visited Google’s headquarters the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Google is known for taking the idea of employee care to the next level with free food, free gyms, laundry at work, free transport to and from work, and a playful atmosphere. No wonder Google is the […]
From time to time I’ve read about companies that provide their employees with some fraction of their paid working time to do what they want. That is, to work on and elaborate any of their own ideas that they like as long as they fall reasonably within the company’s field of business. The most famous […]
Reading the initial chapters of David Teece’s “Dynamic capabilities and strategic management”, I can’t help getting the feeling that the author has got something slightly wrong. I know my credibility in case weighs lightly against the words of the distinguished professor Teece, but let me explain what I feel is wrong with his reasoning. First, […]
More and more people download their music on the internet, and record stores are having a hard time. How come I’ve never heard anyone talk about on–demand CD production in the stores? The rapid decline in the number of record stores was discussed in a program on Swedish Radio P2 a couple of hours ago. […]
I’ve written about how process flexibility and small batch sizes improve production flow in steel industries in a couple of earlier posts (here and here). In this post I’ll discuss how the economical consequences of flexible rolling mill technology can be studied using a conceptual process cost model. The figure below illustrates a conceptual cost model […]
Like an ancient general, a born leader from a noble family, the strategist screens the site for the upcoming battle from a nearby hill. Decides on what resources are needed, and where they should be applied. Directions are given to the officers. Reinforcements are called in from a nearby friendly town if available. The battle […]
The concept of capabilities in strategic management is appealing because it suggests that a company’s competitiveness depends on how it does what it does, not only what market it is in. To me and most others with an engineering background this is totally obvious. Any theory that suggests otherwise seems highly implausible and is also […]
This post is an edited excerpt from my thesis “Strategic and operational capabilities in steel production”. You can download a full PDF here. Capabilities that follow from flexibility on the machine level become more important when a steel plant is producing a wide product range and production volumes are low for each variant. Setup costs […]
I read this interview with famous strategy professor Richard Rumelt [D. Lovallo and L. Mendonca, “Strategy’s strategist: An interview with Richard Rumelt”, The McKinsey Quarterly, nr.4, pp.56–67, 2007]. Rumelt thinks that some of the biggest changes in the strategy field over the last 20 years or so have been in the process of generating business […]
For the moment I’m concerned with industrial innovation processes. Why are they necessary? What types of innovation processes exist in an industrial production company? What’s the link between innovation and competitiveness? And how is innovation linked to related fields like organisational learning and dynamic capabilities? A couple of days ago I received a copy of […]
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