Harvard Business Review on Managing the Value Chain

This is one in a series of several dozen volumes that comprise the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series. Each offers direct, convenient, and inexpensive access to the best thinking ("ideas with impact") about the given subject in articles originally published by the Harvard Business School Review. I strongly recommend all of the volumes in the series. The individual titles are listed at this Web site: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. The authors of various articles are among the world's most highly regarded experts on the given subject. Each volume has been carefully edited. Supplementary commentaries are also provided in most of the volumes, as is an "About the Contributors" section that usually includes suggestions of other sources that some readers may wish to explore. In this volume, the reader is provided with eight articles whose authors provide a variety of perspectives on managing the value chain. Given when they first appeared in the HBR (1993-1998), some but remarkably little of the material is dated. Here are brief excerpts from the Executive Summaries of two articles: "As businesses as diverse as auto manufacturing and financial services move toward modular designs, the authors say, competitive dynamics will change enormously. No longer will assemblers control the final product: suppliers of key modules will gain leverage and even take on responsibility for design rules. Companies will compete either by specifying the dominant design rules (as Microsoft does) or by producing excellent modules (as does disk drive maker Quantum does)." Managing in an Age of Modularity," Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark "In today's fast-changing competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along that old industrial model, the value chain. Successful companies increasingly do not just add [begin italics] value [end italics], they [begin italics] reinvent [end italics], it. The key strategic task is to reconfigure roles and relationships among a constellation of actors - su0pplers, partners, customers - in order to mobilize the creation of value by new combinations of players." From Value Chain to Value Constellations: Designing Interactive Strategy, Richard Normann and Rafael Ramirez I also want to include a brief portion of Joan Magretta's interview of Victor Fung. He later develops many of his thoughts in greater depth in a book, Competing in a Flat World, co-authored with Yoram (Jerry) Wind. Fung is Group Chairman of Li & Fung, Hong Kong's largest export trading company. Magretta: "Can you give me an example of how you reach into the supply chain to shorten the buying cycle?" Fung: "We come in and look at the whole supply chain. We know the Limited is going to order 100,000 garments, but we don't know the style or colors yet. The buyer will tell us that five weeks before delivery. The trust between us and our supply network means that we can reserve undyed yarn from the yarn supplier. I can lock

Excellent stuff... its just that I didn't realize that it was a compliation of HBR articles (which I already owned).- Modularity- Li & Fung Hong Kong- Chrysler Keiretsu- Trust in Retail- The Right Supply Chain- Make your dealers your partners- Value chain constellation- Lean Production

Once again, HBR has produced an accessible book that highlights the forefront of ideas of the value chain. The best part of books in this series is that you don't have to commit to reading the whole book at one time. You can pick up the book when you have time and read a whole case and feel like you are still able to add to you strategy knowledge.

Excellent cases.If you are an operations professional, you'll study, learn and live by whats discussed here. There are a couple of examples that seem dated here, but that is to get the fundamentals right and I dont complain! I am a believer in HBR and this one again goes on to prove why.