The Ideas That Matter Most
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,
though many there be who have tried it.” –Herman Melville
BIG IDEAS come from tackling
big problems. When one is confronted with an overwhelming
task, it’s natural to try to break
it down into manageable pieces. Business jargon is full of phrases about that,
like “pilot projects” and “low-hanging
fruit.” They have their place, but in the
repertory of management practice, they
should share their place with bold approaches to big challenges. Much of
today’s most valuable management
knowledge came from wrestling with
such issues. The most complicated
workplace in the middle of the last century was the automobile assembly plant.
Drawn to its complexity were Peter F. Drucker, W. Edwards
Deming, and Taiichi Ohno, among others. The work they and
their disciples did, applied in industry after industry, is the
basis of the best that we know about operations, managing
people, innovation, organizational design, and much more.
The most complex workplaces today are tertiary care hospitals. These vast enterprises employ tens of thousands of
people who, under one roof, do everything from neurosurgery
to laundry. Each patient – that is to say, each “job” – calls on
a different set of people with a different constellation of
skills; even when two patients have the same diagnosis, success may be measured differently. This is complexity an
order of magnitude greater than automobile assembly, and
anyone who has been hospitalized knows that management
has thus far been unequal to the scope of the task. The workers, managers, consultants, and scholars who crack this nut
will reshape industries and institutions just as profoundly as
Drucker, Deming, and Ohno did.
Amy Edmondson’s article in this issue, “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” discusses hospitals and offers
a powerful hypothesis about how to think about the management of complex, knowledge-based organizations. The
central challenge of industrial-age work was efficiency, Edmondson says; for knowledge-age work, it’s learning. An
organization designed to maximize learning will look, feel,
and behave differently from one whose primary purpose is
efficiency. In suggesting “different how,”
Edmondson begins to define the agenda
for research and practice in twenty-first-century organizations.
This month’s HBR is about that
agenda. It is the second of two special issues to mark Harvard Business
School’s centennial year. (The first was
published in January.) This issue, written entirely by HBS faculty or executive
alumni, focuses on the sources and uses
of competitive advantage: how to get
an edge, keep it sharp, and employ it.
Thus Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg, and
Linda-Eling Lee, building on work by
HBS’s Paul Lawrence, propose a new
way to understand employee motivation; their article makes
a good pair with “Why Did We Ever Go Into HR?” by two
recent MBAs whose career choice surprised some of their
classmates. Anand Mahindra, CEO of Mahindra & Mahindra,
describes how his company must change to compete in developed markets – and maintain its position of strength at
home as Western companies enter India. Two articles offer
smart advice for getting an edge from functions that are
often allowed to be dull utilities: finance (an article by Mihir
Desai) and IT (Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson). A brilliant article by Anita Elberse does what research should do:
It examines a popular notion, in this case “the long tail,” and
reveals how much is fact and how much fad.
Leaders, too, need a competitive edge. To that end I recommend Robert S. Kaplan’s “Reaching Your Potential” and
“The Uncompromising Leader,” by a group led by Russell
Eisenstat and Michael Beer. The mission of Harvard Business
School is “to educate leaders who make a difference in the
world.” Those two articles in particular show how it’s done.
Thomas A. Stewart
