استراتژی تولید: داستان تکامل آن

This essay has two stories to tell: first, as promised, the evolution of what is known as “manufacturing strategy” and, also, the parallel story of the value of combining teaching and research through the Harvard Business School's focus on teaching by the case method. This second tale may be of particular interest in view of recent critiques of business schools and their research practices [Bennis, W.G., O’Toole, J., 2005. How business schools lost their way. Harvard Business Review 83 (5), 96–104].

My college years at Yale during World War II were non-stop: universities were teaching year-round. As soon as I had my degree in chemical engineering, I volunteered for immediate induction into the U.S. Army and right away became an infantry private. Days before being shipped to Europe, I was transferred to the Engineer Corps for duty on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. I learned some industrial engineering and became fascinated with the valuable insights, which came from measuring and analyzing material and manpower flows. As soon as I left the Army, I headed for the Harvard Business School. In 1946 and 1947, I experienced exciting and demanding analytic breakthroughs three times a day, 5 days a week. In concert with my classmates in the case method, I was consistently wrong in my pre-class analyses and this was humbling. But the power of in-depth, hard-worked analysis eventually produced confidence and, often, contrarian insights. Contrarian! That role felt somehow natural. The next 10 years at Honeywell provided tough bosses and unambiguous jobs in production (6 years), marketing and sales (2 years) and 2 years as a divisional finance officer. Honeywell also trained me in the process of leading management development classes which reminded me of my admiration for my Harvard MBA instructors. I became fascinated with why organizations worked and, when they didn’t, what to do about it. In 1958, I resigned from Honeywell and entered the Harvard Business School's doctoral program.