An Action Perspective: The Crux of the New Management

See Byrne John A. , “The Horizontal Corporation.” Business Week. December 20. 1993, pp. 76–81.

On postindustrialism, see Bell Daniel , The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York. NY: Basic Books, 1973). On post-Fordism—which posits a new economic era based on flexibility—see Piore Michael J. Sabel Charles F. , The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York. NY: Basic Books. 1984). On the controversial cultural notion of postmodernism see (among many other sources) Harvey David . The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge. MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988), which explicitly ties the cultural developments of recent decades to the new socio-economic patterns of post-Fordism. For an earlier treatment of postmodernity that helped set many parameters of the current debate, see Lyotard Jean-François , The Postmodern Condition:

A Report on Knowledge, tr. Bennington Geoff Massumi Brian (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1984).

See Handy Charles . The Age of Unreason (Boston. MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1990).

See Peters Tom , “Get Innovative or Get Dead.” California Management Review, 33/1 (1990): 9–26.

Over the last decade, the management industry boom has both nurtured and fed on the widespread conviction of a sea-change in management thinking. Statistics give some indication of this boom's extent: There was a 118% rise in annual sales of business books between 1982 and 1992 (from $225 million to S490 million), and a 334% rise in consulting revenues over the same period (from $3.5 billion to $15.2 billion). For an analysis of this trend, including these and other statistics, see Nohria Nitin Berkley James D. , “Whatever Happened to the Take-Charge Manager?” Harvard Business Renew, 72 (January/February 1994): 128–137.

For a discussion of the retreat of coordination and control mechanisms to the “backstage” or organizational life, see the authors' article, “The Virtual Organization: Bureaucracy. Technology, and the Implosion of Control.” forthcoming in Heckscher Charles Donnellon Anne , eds., The Post-Bureaucratic Organization: New Perspectives on Organizational Change (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. 1994).

See Peters Tom . Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (New York. NY: Knopf, 1987), and Davidow Thomas H. Malone David S. , The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (New York, NY: HarperBusiness. 1992).

A good example of the enthusiasm for teams in the business media can be seen in Brian Dumaine. “Who Needs a Boss?” Fortune. May 7, 1990, pp. 52–60. For a more academic discussion of teams that builds upon experiments in practice, see Hackman Richard . Groups that Work and Those That Don't (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 1989). See also the popular recent work of Jon Kaizenbach R. Smith Douglas K. , The Wisdom of Teams (Boston. MA: Harvard University Press. 1993). Corning's use of teams is discussed in Hammonds Keith H. , “Corning's Class Act: How Jamie Houghton Reinvented the Company,” Business Week, May 13, 1991, pp. 68–73. See also “Lessons in Leadership: James R. Houghton.” Harvard Business Review, 69 (November/December 1991): 90–91.

The background of the ICCG story is discussed in Berkley James D. Nohria Nitin , “Allen-Bradley's ICCG: Repositioning for the 1990s,” Case Study 9-491-066. Harvard Business School Publishing Division, 1991.

See Rodgers T.J. , “No Excuses Management.” Harvard Business Review, 68 (July/ August 1990): 84–99.

See Eccles Robert G. , “The Performance Measurement Manifesto.” Harvard Business Review, 69 (January/February 1991): 131–137; see also Johnson Thomas Kaplan Robert A. , Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston. MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1987).

In this trend too, however, one can see the dangers of a design-perspective creeping back in. Many (inns have recently fixated on “balanced scorecards” that promise to capture all the relevant performance metrics in an organization. In doing so, they forget that the reason to focus on multiple measures in the first place was not to fix attention on givens but to focus on actual organizational processes with the recognition that these are open to constant change and variation. Sec Kaplan Robert S. Norton David P. , “The Balanced Scorecard — Measures That Drive Performance.” Harvard Business Review. 70 (January/February 1992): 71–80.

See Hamel Gary Prahalad C.K. , “Strategic Intent.” Harvard Business Review, 67 (May/June 1989): 63–76; also see Henkoff Ronald , “How to Plan for 1995.” Fortune, December 31, 1990, pp. 70–79.

See Prahalad C.K. Hamel Gary , “The Core Competencies of the Corporation,” Harvard Business Review, 68 (May/June 1990): 79–91.

Investment banks offer one of the best examples of this mode of strategy formulation. See Eccles Robert G. Crane Dwight B. , Doing Deals: Investment Banks at Work, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 1988).

See Nonaka Ikujiro , “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Harvard Business Review, 69 (November/December 1991): 96–104.

On the relations among human, social, and financial capital, see Burt Ronald , Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1992).

See Bierman Harold Jr. Smidt Seymour . The Capital Budgeting Decision, 5th ed. (New York. NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980).

For evidence of the ubiquitous use of DCF techniques by U.S. corporations, see Scott D. F. Jr. Petty J.W. II , “Capital Budgeting Practices in Large American Firms: A Retrospective Analysis and Synthesis.” Financial Review, 19 (March 1984): 111–123.

For discussion of some of the particular limitations facing traditional capital allocation tools, see Kester W. Carl , “Today's Options for Tomorrow's Growth,” Harvard Business Review, 62 (March/April 1984): 153–160.

Teisberg Elizabeth Olmstead , “Strategic Responses to Uncertainty,” Harvard Business School Working Paper. 1990.

Our formulation of robust action comes from a dissertation done by Eric Leifer in the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In studying chess grandmasters. Leifer found that what distinguished them from novices was not, as is commonly held, their ability to think through many more subsequent moves than novices. Instead, he found that at each move they acted “robustly” by trying to keep their degrees of freedom as open as possible while still taking possible steps to win. See Leifer Eric M. , Actors as Observers: A Theory of Skill in Social Relationships (New York. NY: Garland, 1991).

Many such human resources experiments are covered in a recent issue of HR Focus entitled “Brave New Workplace: Issues and Trends in Human Resource Management.” See HR Focus. 71 (January 1994). A discussion of flexible benefits can be found in Mitchell Daniel B. , “A Proposal for Reforming Employee Benefits.” California Management Review, 33 (1990): 113–130.

On the practices of investment banks in this area, see Eccles Crane , op. cit.; see also Eccles Crane , “Managing Through Networks in Investment Banking,” California Management Review, 30/1 (Fall 1987): 176–195.

See Love Geoff , “Compaq Computer Corporation,” Case Study 9-491-011. Harvard Business School Publishing Division, 1990, rev. 1991.