Time--The Next Source of Competitive Advantage Review

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(More customer reviews)George Stalk Jr. is Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group, the famous management consultancy. This article was published in the July-August 1988 issue of the Harvard Business Review and won the McKinsey Award for best article that year.
By building on MIT's Jay Forrester research into the planning, the author shows how companies can create competitive advantages through managing time effectively. The author discusses in detail time-based manufacturing, time-based sales and distribution, and time-based innovation. For instance, in time-based manufacturing the key components are the length of production runs, organization of process components, and complexity of scheduling procedures. The speed of the flow of information has important impact on sales and distribution, while the speed of innovations can result in a reduction of delivery time and manufacturing costs. The author concludes that time advantage offers a powerful new approach for successful indirect attacks against larger, established competitors. The author uses Japanese companies such as Honda and Toyota as main examples.
I do like this article and agree with the author's opinion that time/speed can be a source of competitive advantage. The way the author tries to get his point across is sometimes disappointing, the author's obsession with Japan companies vs. US/Western companies is too one-sided. This obsession is probably a sign of the time since the article was published in 1988. Modern-day examples of successful time-based competitors are Amazon.com (read Robert Spector (2000), 'Amazon.com: Get Big Fast') and Dell Computer (read Joan Magretta's interview with Michael Dell (1998), 'The Power of Virtual Integration'). The author uses simple US-English.

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