Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation

TWOThe Thinking Behind Rethinking

“If you don’t know where you are going,you might wind up someplace else.”

–Yogi Bera

WHEN BUSINESSPEOPLE talk about the extraordinary productivity gains of the last decade, the lion’s share of credit typically goes to technology. I protest. Although it’s true that major advances in the machines and software that gather, process, and distribute information have made possible whole new ways of organizing work in a company, business productivity owes just as much to operational design theory. In fact, innovative design concepts such as the time-and-motion studies of the early 1900s, the total quality management (TQM) programs of the ’80s, and the reengineering initiatives of the ’90s led to enormous gains in ...