Gaining competitive advantage:
The Japanese challenge shook the confidence of the western business elite, but detailed comparisons of the two management styles and examinations
of successful businesses convinced westerners that they could overcome the challenge. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a plethora of theories
explaining exactly how this could be done. They cannot all be detailed here, but some of the more important strategic advances of the decade
are explained below.
Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad declared that strategy needs to be more active and interactive; less “arm-chair planning” was needed. They
introduced terms like strategic intent and strategic architecture.[18][19] Their most well known advance was the idea of core competency.
They showed how important it was to know the one or two key things that your company does better than the competition.
Active strategic management required active information gathering and active problem solving. In the early days of Hewlett-Packard (H-P),
Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett devised an active management style that they called Management By Walking Around (MBWA). Senior H-P managers
were seldom at their desks. They spent most of their days visiting employees, customers, and suppliers. This direct contact with key people
provided them with a solid grounding from which viable strategies could be crafted. The MBWA concept was popularized in 1985 by a book by
Tom Peters and Nancy Austin. Japanese managers employ a similar system, which originated at Honda, and is sometimes called the 3 G's
(Genba, Genbutsu, and Genjitsu, which translate into “actual place”, “actual thing”, and “actual situation”).
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References
- Wikipedia.org
