Publications
Publications
- October 2001 (Revised November 2001)
- HBS Case Collection
Running and Growing the Small Company: Course Overview
Abstract
Addresses challenges facing managers, presidents, and owners in generating and sustaining superior performance, especially as a company broadens its mix of goods and services, increases the volume of its sales, and enlarges the size of its workforce. The critical concern of the course is the day-to-day, figuring out what to do and how to do it across a span of managerial responsibilities in a variety of professional settings. This day-to-day search and discovery of objectives and methods is embedded in the reality that leaders alone cannot be the sole sources of creative wisdom. Rather, organizations generate goods, services, and information through processes--the collective efforts of many people, each responsible for designing, performing, and improving small parts of larger wholes. Ideally, discovery is distributed among everyone, with the processes and artifacts in place to span boundaries. However, the cases reveal that this does not occur well in many organizations. Some are terribly limited by the inability of managers to leverage the talents of the people with whom they work. Through class discussion and projects, students discover how managers can move from this growth-limited state closer to one where everyone contributes. Many of the course's lessons are rooted in industrial situations in which know-how--as reflected in the processes by which products are designed and made--differentiates winners from losers. Shows that these lessons can also be applied to nonindustrial settings, such as health care, software design, and consulting, to create and sustain competitive advantage. In these industries especially, knowledge and capabilities often must be discovered experientially, not by invention in an off-line laboratory. Furthermore, the exploitation of these occurs through the sharing of learned behavior, not through the mechanistic replication of manufactured physical goods. A rewritten version of an earlier note.
Keywords
Citation
Spear, Steven J. "Running and Growing the Small Company: Course Overview." Harvard Business School Background Note 602-077, October 2001. (Revised November 2001.)