Clockspeed : Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage

Learn how businesses can survive—and thrive—in the midst of constant change, with this informative and accessible guide.

In Clockspeed, Charles Fine draws on a decade's worth of research at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management to introduce a new vocabulary for understanding the forces of competition and making strategic decisions that will determine the destiny of your company, as well as your industry.

Taking inspiration from the world of biology, Fine argues that each industry has its own evolutionary life cycle (or "clockspeed"), measured by the rate at which it introduces new products, processes, and organizational structures. Just as geneticists study the fruit fly to gain insight into the evolutionary paths of all animals, managers in any industry can learn from the industrial fruit flies—such as Internet services, personal computers, and multimedia entertainment—which evolve through new generations at breakneck speed. Applying the lessons of the fruit flies to industries as diverse as bicycles, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, Fine illustrates how competitive advantage is lost or gained by how well a company manages dynamic web of relationships that run throughout its chain of suppliers, distributors, and alliance partners.

Packed with revolutionary concepts and tools to help managers make key strategic decisions that affect current and future performance, Clockspeed shows, as no other book before it, how the ultimate core competency is mastering the art of supply chain design, carefully choosing which components and capabilities to keep in-house and which to purchase from outside. Clockspeed not only serves up some new "laws" of value chain dynamics, but also offers recommendations for achieving industry leadership through simultaneous product, process, and supply chain design.

In challenging managers to think like corporate geneticists Clockspeed contributes the next creative leap in business strategy.

Charles H. Fine is a professor of management and director of the Technology Supply Chain Research Project at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He has conducted extensive research on the dynamics of technology management, supply chain design, and industry competitiveness, and has consulted to major corporations, including GM, Corning, Lockheed, and Intel.