Huawei has become China's most prominent multinational company and a leader in the ICT sector. Given unprecedented access to the company, the authors of this book examine the management transformation of Huawei from its inception in 1987 until 2019, observing in detail not only the creation of its organizational routines but also the breaking of… More »
My Notes — Bookshelf
Framework and Toolkit for Improving Peripheral Strategic Vision
Day and Shoemaker have developed a useful framework and toolkit for assessing how much peripheral strategic vision your company needs.
An MIT Sloan article lays out the ideas in three steps.
More details on the toolkit are in their HBR article that can be assessed here.
“China’s Innovation Challenge” published with Cambridge University Press
Arie Lewin, Martin Kenney and Johann Peter Murmann edited a new book on China's Innovation Challenge: Overcoming the Middle-Income Trap. New March 2016: Download Fronter Matter and Introductory Chapter The book will also feature contributions from Justin Yifu Lin, Gordon Redding, Michael Witt, Keun Lee, Douglas Fuller, John Child, Simon Collison, Yves Doz, Keeley Wilson,… More »
Review of “China’s Path to Innovation” by Xiaolan Fu
To date there are few research monographs that go beyond picking out striking cases of innovative companies. We clearly also need systematic analyses of China’s growing innovative capacity. For this reason, Xiaolan Fu’s book China's Path to Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a welcome addition to the literature. Fu is Professor of Technology and… More »
The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think
In their new book, The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed carefully identified from all publicly listed American firms those firms that performed very highly over long periods of time. When they tried to find out what they had in common, they could not identify concrete behavior. What made… More »
Scaffolding in Economics, Management, and the Design of Technologies
This chapter reviews the ideas that have been developed to describe the emergence and change of structures in three fields: Economics, Management, and Design of Technologies. The chapter focuses on one empirical setting, the economy, and more specifically how firms, industries, and technologies change over time. Today’s industrialized economies are very different from the economies… More »
Flat World Knowledge Provides Textbooks for Free
Do you need to learn a new subject but you want to do it on your own and not pay for it. Flat World Knowledge publishes free textbooks if you simply want to read them online and not print them. I found it useful to look up a textbook on project management. For a full… More »
Review of DuPont?s Dyes Business: Three Decades of Innovation, 1950-1980
Joseph Innarone and John Tackray are two former members of the DuPont dye business that experienced its golden age after World War II and was sold off in 1979, marking the visible onset of the decline of the U.S. synthetic dye industry. The authors are not research chemists. For the entire period covered by the book, they both held different jobs in the dye business, spanning technical service, sales, and business management. In course of their various assignments that started for both of them as trainees in the Technical Laboratory, the authors acquired substantial knowledge of dye innovations and the business of selling dyes. Rather than attempting a scholarly history (only five sources are cited), the authors offer their own personal history of Du Pont’s dye business. Their story is valuable for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding how DuPont became an innovator in the synthetic dye industry yet in the 1970s could no longer compete successfully with foreign rivals. Du Pont exited the industry in 1979 as later did all other U.S. headquartered firms. Download full Review in AMBIX, Vol. 57 No. 3, November, 2010.
Phil Tetlock Critically Reviews Three Books on Forecasting the Future
Tetlock does us the service of giving a close reading of three books that what to overcome the obstacle that Yogi Berra identified in his qib: "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future.” The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing by Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat. The Predictioneer's Game: Using… More »
Three Books on the Origins of the Financial Crisis and its Lessons
John Lanchester reviews three books on the origins of the financial crisis and its lessons in the New Yorker. Two of them are useful for the general reader. Gillian Tett, “Fool’s Gold” (Free Press) Richard A. Posner, “A Failure of Capitalism” (Harvard) I personally personally found Fools Gold the most rewarding of all the books… More »