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Clockspeed : Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage

Clockspeed : Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage
By Charles H. Fine

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In business today, all advantage is temporary. In order to survive-let alone thrive-companies must be able to anticipate and adapt to change, or face rapid, brutal extinction. 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.The consequences of faulty of visionary decisions can be enormous and dramatic. Witness the case of IBM in the early 1980s, when it outsourced key PC components to Microsoft and Intel, unleashing the “Intel Inside” phenomenon and a complete restructuring of the computer industry. Going further, Fine sees the personal computer as merely a component in the vast information-entertainment industry, which evolves at speeds unimagined a few years ago. He uses this “fruit fly” as well to peer into the future of industrial evolution and find practical advice for players in all industries, from automobiles to health care information systems.Clockspeed not only serves up some new “laws” of value chain dynamics, but it 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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #41940 in Books
  • Published on: 1999-10-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 288 pages

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Based on extensive research he conducted at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, professor Charles H. Fine determined that fruit flies hold the key to the future of business. Not the insects themselves, actually, but the way geneticists study their extraordinarily condensed life spans to gain insight into the much more drawn-out human existence. In like manner, Fine suggests that industries with a very rapid evolutionary rate, or clockspeed, be examined for information that will benefit businesses of all kinds--as well as national economic systems, universities, and even religious institutions--although any edge that emerges may, without additional work, prove to be fleeting. In Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine lays out his resultant theories of business genetics. He focuses on "fruit fly industries" such as personal computers and information-entertainment providers and the lessons he says can be learned by dissecting their internal processes, product development procedures, and organizational arrangements. He then proposes ways that other companies can utilize the positive patterns of industry structure that appear. Those whose eyes do not glaze over at the mere thought of calculating "capital equipment obsolesce rates" should find this absorbing and thought-provoking. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly
In propounding a "theory of business genetics," Fine, a professor of management at MIT, analyzes factors that determine corporate evolution, then outlines approaches to aid strategic decision making. For Fine, industries change at different rates, or "clockspeeds," depending on differing opportunities for innovation and competition, as is the case in the animal kingdom. Changing relationships and their causes often seem more apparent, he notes, in fast-clockspeed scenarios such as the current computer industry. However, "all advantage is temporary," Fine continues, "and the faster the clockspeed, the more temporary the advantage." Against that background, his main thesis is that design of the supply chain is "the ultimate core competency" for maintaining advantage in business. Fine advocates diligently and continuously studying its dynamics from the standpoints of organization, technology and capability. Citing the case of IBM as a cautionary tale, Fine notes the company's flawed decision to outsource its PC's microprocessor and operating system, with the result that customers are more concerned with the label "Intel Inside" than the actual makeup of their computer. Oriented primarily to specialists (and prospective clients) in the computer industry, Fine's theorizing suffers somewhat from management jargon yet is impressively well tuned.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"A new lens for rethinking your business and the tools to mine your supply chain for fresh gold." -- Atlanta Business Chronicle

Customer Reviews

Two books in one - one that i loved!4
I find the book is divided in two books:
1. analysis of supply chains, understanding an industry, and how you can draw conclusions and foresee the future,
2. how to work with supply chains; what to build or buy and how to treat your suppliers, etc.
I am interested in the analysis and not supply chain so the first part of the book was pleasing.

I will tell you why I liked the first part of the book:
a) Fine describes how fast an industry is "updated". From the slowest (ex: military and civic flight) to the fastest (ex: mobile telephony, internet, etc). This made me understand why mobile operators have lost the war against the Nokias of the world, and why all are afraid when Google and Yahoo! enters the mobile space.

b) He then tells you why an industry is VERTICAL with
integral/integrated parts or HORIZONTAL with modular parts and what drives an industry to change, and why the change goes back and forth over time. This was absolutely fantastic for me because it really explained the rationale behind internal development, niches and outsourcing.

The rest of the book describes ethics and philosophy within supply chain dynamics, how to control sourcing, and simple rules of why to build or buy.

Fine writes in a simple language, but the toolbox he gives you is complex and made me understand the industry I work in with new eyes!

A great way to fall asleep1
I read this book as part of an MBA curriculum and was so bored by it I almost dropped the class. If you are a supply chain freak and love this kind of stuff you might like reading over and over again about stretched biological analogies but if you are focusing on any other discipline and just want a taste of competitive advantage in supply chain I recommend you look elsewhere.

Supply Chain: design should come first5
Fine's book creates clear connection among Supply Chain, Product Development and Manufacturing activities. MIT's Professor Fine establishes an operational and strategic link among those company's environment. The book put in a plain text how to analyze you supply chain and how to design it accordly a strategy view. Finally, Supply Chain Design is proclaimed as being essential to assure competitive advantage and to sustain the company's progress. If you want to really understand supply chain, it is a book that you must read!