MLab / Welcome to the Management Lab

Management processes, such as product planning, are the levers by which large companies are run. To get the picture, imagine a giant Caterpillar loader with a bewildering array of levers. Yank on one lever and the behemoth turns left, pull another lever and a giant shovel swings up, grab another and the whole contraption rotates around its central axis.

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If you missed the recent news about Best Buy, it’s probably because you were working. Time is money, isn’t it? Not always. Especially not at Best Buy. The December 11, 2006 cover story of BusinessWeekOnline reports that Best Buy has inaugurated a new management practice.

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In 1998 Thomas W. Malone and Robert J. Laubacher of MIT looked at how a new kind of organisation could form the basis of an economy where the old rules of business are overturned and big companies are rendered obsolete.

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To the outside world, HCL Technologies (38,000 employees, $1 billion plus in revenues) is just another big Indian IT services company, and on paper its structure and its processes look remarkably similar to everyone else’s.

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At the beginning of the 1990s, IBM — once the biggest, most profitable, and most highly regarded technology company in the world - stared into the corporate abyss. Its travails were fi nancially and commercially disastrous. More important for the
company’s future was that what had made IBM great no longer worked: its culture and values had stagnated.

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