Operations strategy

What you measure is what you get. Senior executives understand that their organization’s measurement system strongly affects the behavior of managers and employees. Executives also understand that traditional financial accounting measures like return-on-investment and earnings-per-share can give misleading signals for continuous improvement and innovation—activities today’s competitive environment demands. The traditional financial performance measures worked well […]

For starters, it’s not the same as operational effectiveness.

Increasingly, multinational corporations (MNCs) are pledging to procure the materials and services they need from companies committed to fair labor practices...

The U.S.-China trade war and the supply and demand shocks brought on by the Covid-19 crisis are forcing manufacturers everywhere to reassess their supply...

Artificial intelligence is transforming all sectors of the economy, but there's no reason to fear that robots will replace all human employees. In fact,...

One of the most promising applications of emerging blockchain technology is supply chain management. Blockchain--the digital record-keeping system developed...

Corporate executives and consumers have in recent years adopted divergent views of product quality. Several recent surveys indicate how wide the quality perception gap is: Three out of five chief executives of the country’s largest 1,300 companies said in a 1981 survey that quality is improving; only 13% said it is declining.1 Yet 49% of […]

For two decades progressive thinkers have argued that a more sustainable form of capitalism would arise if companies regularly measured and reported on...

A few years ago, a major manufacturing-based conglomerate asked a gifted mathematician to join its corporate staff. One of his first assignments was to design a system that senior managers could use to evaluate the operating efficiency of the company’s various divisions. He devoted many months to the assignment and also tapped the knowledge of […]

A framework to ensure your digital investments are driven by strategic objectives.

To today's customers, value can mean any number of things, from convenience of purchase to after-sale service and dependability. But that doesn't mean...

Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things—knowledge, relationships, and motivation that distant rivals cannot match.

A survey of 761 of the largest corporations in North America and Europe showed that the number of corporate functions had increased at about a third from...

The pandemic has cast a spotlight on a historically undervalued asset.

Photography: Getty Images The Idea: Mining involves risk, and some executives believe fatalities are inevitable. But after nearly 200 on-the-job deaths in the five years prior to her arrival, Carroll decided to take a public stand to create safer working conditions. When I became the CEO of Anglo American, in 2007, I encountered plenty of […]

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work. To make big improvements in productivity and customer service, people in an organization...

Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned...

Out of a sense of corporate responsibility, many of today's manufacturers are making commodity-like components to preserve jobs. This single-minded focus...

Jack Emmons, the CEO of Voici Brands, knew his apparel company needed a supply chain overhaul. Over the past couple of years, sales had dropped because...

In recent years a growing number of companies have expended considerable amounts of time and money to develop strategic planning skills in their profit centers and at higher organizational levels. We applaud this effort, but as we stand back and observe large and small companies alike apply this new talent and expertise, we are struck […]