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How Lean is the Lean Startup?
What does this Lean Startup thing have to do with Lean? What can a startup learn from an established giant like Toyota, or vice versa? Where is my value-stream map, I need a value-stream map, right?...
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Webrooming and lessons from Verkkokauppa.com, Target and Gap
Webrooming is the new hype and hope of brick-and-mortar stores. The reverse of showrooming (going to a physical store and then buying the product online), webrooming stands for researching the product...
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Lean in new employee orientation – gemba orientation
The company I work for recently hired a new CFO, and I was asked to give him orientation training on his very first day. HR department had a meeting room lined up, and everything was good to go for a...
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Is the Finnish manufacturing industry at a dead end?
It is a grim time to be working in manufacturing in Finland. Then again, it’s been grim times for more than 30 years already: Finland lost around 240,000 manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 2011, of...
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On process innovation and technology disruption
Recent McKinsey reports (1, 2) have predicted a disruptive revolution in technology that will change the landscape of manufacturing. According to McKinsey, it is vital that the technology strategy of...
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Why is reshoring happening in the USA, but not elsewhere?
While still taking fledgling steps, reshoring seems to be bringing manufacturing and related jobs back to the USA. However, the phenomenon does not seem to be taking place in the rest of the developed...
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Sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation – case Lego
How important are various forms of innovation to a company? Gary Pisano, a professor at the Harvard Business School, recently wrote an article called In Defense of Routine Innovation on Harvard...
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Lego Movie, Friends, and the struggle to nurture creativity
Lego has been subject to significant criticism for perpetuating gender stereotypes since its introduction of the Lego Friends series in 2011. Furthermore, while the recent Lego Movie has received...
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Why is Amazon battling Hachette? It’s deeper than you think
The battle between Amazon and Hachette, one of the big five book publishers in the USA, has been going on for months now. The most visible effect of the battle so far has been Amazon’s delays in...
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Foundations of Business Strategy and Strategist’s Toolkit
Massively open online courses (MOOC) are changing the field of education. As most courses are offered for free, the big question is what is the motivation for the course providers to go through all the...
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A Porter plus approach to strategic analysis
Michael Porter’s influence on strategic management can hardly be overemphasized. While his work has come under increasing criticism, it remains vitally relevant. Porter has been able to answer much of...
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“Best practices” are not the best practices
It is a rare firm where managers are not encouraged to seek “best practices” in order to improve operations. But how effective are best practices, really? Such ways to arrange activities might not make...
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Vision, purpose, and manners – a framework for strategy and culture
The internet is full of corporate vision, mission, and value statements. What all of these statements contain can be ennobling at best, and downright bland and meaningless at worst. What each part...
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How to learn a new area of expertise in two weeks
The amount of information available online has continuously increased, and it is now easier than ever to learn new skills. The key to such learning is the ability to find relevant information online...
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Dynamic capabilities, the scope of strategy, and Lean
Dynamic capabilities framework is a promising framework for strategic management. Based on and expanding upon the resource-based view of the firm, its founding paper by David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, and...
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The PDSA cycle is a core 21st century skill
What are the skills we need nowadays? Have they changed from what was needed before? The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills research program, headquartered at the University of Melbourne,...
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Moore’s category maturity life cycle and innovation types
I have been looking for ways to make sense of product life cycles in environments where there are no real products as such, but in which offerings are instead tailored to customer needs. Yet, even in...
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What should Hachette do to survive digitalization?
The Hachette versus Amazon battle keeps going on as the most visible symbol of the changing landscape of the publishing industry. I have written about it before, but this time I want to take a look at...
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10 examples of serendipity in social business
One of the main reasons for an enterprise to embrace internal transparency and social collaboration tools is to create an environment where serendipity happens on a regular basis. But what does it...
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Use of LEGO bricks in teaching collaborative problem solving
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an important 21st century skill. CPS is important, because both manual and non-manual work are increasingly non-standard, and because of this, the requirements...
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