Gary P. Pisano

Gary Pisano believes that large corporations can be innovators and he explains how in this book. Pisano is realistic about the challenges that face large organizations when it comes to radical innovation. As he argues, however, there are no natural laws that preclude large enterprises from innovating. He points to large organizations in the past and present that have maintained creative capacity even as they have grown. Pisano extracts the lessons to be learned from these examples and conveys those lessons in a clear and methodical manner. Executives, managers, team leaders, and consultants will benefit from the realistic guidelines Pisano presents in this book.… (meer)

The authors build their book around the concept of an "Industrial Commons" which is a common pool of experience/knowledge derived from closely linked designing and manufacturing in a country or region.

They show beyond doubt that the US outsourcing of the last 20 years has destroyed the "Industrial Commons" for many vital industries and their associated supplier networks making it often impossible for new entrants to set up in the United States.

In this respect the book is excellent, but they could have gone on to use the same level of analysis to find a route round the serious blockages to change in US industry and government policy. The way that they leave it is rather like visiting Detroit and telling the resident unemployed that if they all study like South Koreans everything will be fine, which many be true, but how is it going to happen?

They could have spent some time on counterforces to outsourcing, such as the changing international cost structure. The US now has much cheaper fuel costs (gas) than Asia, the cost of Chinese labour in dollars is 5x greater than it was in year 2000 and robotics have advanced to such an extent that labour is clearly taking a declining share of production costs.

The latter point is critical but isn't emphasized at all in the book. To quote from Charles Fishman's article "The Insourcing Boom" (The Atlantic, December 2012), "Back in the 60's Appliance Park (G.E.) was turning out 250.000 appliances a month. The assembly lines there today are turning out as many - with at most one third of the workers." And interestingly, most of them are earning $13 an hour which isn't a middle class wage.

This is a whole different type of manufacturing, and they don't look at the "Maker" movement either. At the moment this is mostly low tech but as Chris Anderson points out in his book, "Makers, The New Industrial Revolution" participants are adopting for example the Arduino open source electronic prototyping platform that has a lot of interesting possibilities.

The international sociological angle has also disappeared from the book. They could have mentioned that India, China and Eastern Europe have all recently emerged from disastrous centrally planned systems and are now building fresh new market economies. In contrast the United States has a sclerotic, complex and special interest dominated late stage market system where government is almost dysfunctional and where identity politics is quickly pulling society apart (see Bill Bishop's, "The Big Sort").… (meer)