【Speaker】Michael A. Cusumano, Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

【Topic】Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World

【Time】13:30pm-16:00pm, 2010-10-18

【Venue】Room 385, Weilun Building, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】English

【Organizer】Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the MBA Program

Professor Cusumano has taught at MIT since 1986. He is the SMR Distinguished Professor of Management and head of the Behavioral Sciences Area at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as Professor of Engineering Systems, MIT School of Engineering. He is also a Director of Patni Computer Systems (India) and Eliza Corporation (USA), and a Board Advisor to FixStars Corporation (Japan).

He specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in the computer software industry, as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. He teaches courses on the software business, strategic management, and technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

Professor Cusumano has published eight books. For example,The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad, was named one of the best business books of 2004 by Steve Lohr of theNew York Times. It is translated into Japanese and Chinese.Microsoft Secrets(1995, with Richard Selby) is a best-selling study of Microsoft's strategy, organization, and approach to software development, and has approximately 150,000 copies in print in 14 languages.

For more his background, please go to the website: http://web.mit.edu/cusumano/www.

Lecture Abstract

Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World

(Lessons from Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, Toyota, and More)

This lecture presents an overview of Professor Cusumano’s new book, titledStaying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World, prepared for the 2009 Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies at the University of Oxford. The focus of the lecture and book is on how managers can tackle the simultaneous challenge of “innovation and commoditization” -the demand for new products, features, and services, at low prices or even for free – which has occurred in many high-tech industries. The research centers on examples from firms in the automobile, software, and consumer electronics industries that have demonstrated unique abilities to perform well over long periods of time, including Toyota and Microsoft as well as Intel, Apple, Google, IBM, and many others. The basic concepts are drawn from Professor Cusumano’s research over the past 30 years but also have been studied extensively by management researchers in several disciplines. The six principles that managers should think about - each of which has a counterpart in current management practice - are: (1) platforms, not just products; (2) services, not just products (or platforms) (3) capabilities, not just strategy; (4) pull, don’t just push; (5) scope, not just scale; and (6) flexibility, not just efficiency. The first two principles extend the capabilities and innovation horizons of the product firm beyond conventional thinking about strategy and business models. The next four principles all deal with “agility” or the ability of the firm to anticipate as well as react quickly and effectively to change. Professor Cusumano positions each idea against other concepts frequently associated with ‘best practices’ and competitive advantage but which he believes are less valuable than they seem. Finally, he discusses the difficulty of arriving at any absolute set of “best practices” or “excellent firms” given the limitations of case studies and research methods that limit our ability to generalize.