Preface
I began work on this book more than ten years ago with a simple question: How do managers balance innovation and control? Data that I had collected from over one hundred companies revealed a puzzling anomaly: the most innovative companies used their profit planning and control systems more intensively than did their less innovative counterparts. I had expected the opposite result. Existing theory predicted that innovative companies should minimize formal controls to reduce bureaucracy and allow creativity to flourish.
Since then, I have studied scores of highly regarded companies and the control levers their senior managers use. In my teaching at Harvard, I have developed case studies in a variety of industries and have refined concepts ...
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