Publications
Publications
- April 2004 (Revised November 2004)
- HBS Case Collection
Why Complex Systems Fail
Abstract
Operationally excellent organizations create competitive opportunities for themselves that are not available to their peers. One view of the manager's competitive dilemma is to pick the right position for his organization, differentiating it, for example, as a high-quality or low-cost provider of specific products or services. But the most operationally outstanding organizations offer a wider variety of products or services with higher quality and lower cost (along with many other desirable traits), rendering competitors' differentiating strategies less relevant. Although they, too, have to make tradeoffs, they do so along increasingly better frontiers. In other words, they compete not only in terms of what they do, but also in how well they do it and how well they get better at doing it. In this first session of a module exploring how complex work systems can be managed to achieve outstanding results, students are encouraged to develop a systems view--an appreciation that an organization's success is more than the sum of the efforts of its individual members. Students first learn how systems fail. Why is the whole often far less than the sum of its parts--often tragically so? In the second session, students develop principles for managing systems more successfully, and in the third and fourth sessions, they learn how to apply these principles to "brown field sites"--organizations already operating but in need of significant performance improvement.
Keywords
Citation
Spear, Steven J., and Bryce LaPierre. "Why Complex Systems Fail." Harvard Business School Background Note 604-083, April 2004. (Revised November 2004.)