Making Organizations Competitive: Enhancing Networks and Relationships Across Traditional Boundaries (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1991)
by Ralph H. Kilmann, Ines Kilmann, and Associates
From the Book Jacket
This book shows executives and managers how they can make their organizations more responsive, creative, and flexible by building strong strategic alliances among groups who traditionally do not see each other as partners.
Written by leading academic authorities and practicing managers, Making Organizations Competitive offers practical techniques for coordinating competitive policies among diverse functions within an organization—including human resources, manufacturing, marketing, R&D, strategic planning, and industrial relations—thereby stimulating them to work together to achieve competitive goals. The authors also demonstrate how to establish joint ventures, partnerships, subcontracts, and other kinds of collaborative relationships with outside companies in order to take advantage of their expertise, share technologies, reduce development costs, and distribute risks. They suggest ways to forge productive relationships between groups that are traditionally adversaries, such as labor and management, or government and business. And they recommend ways to bring products to market faster, build customized products that satisfy consumer demand, and increase quality by linking designers with engineers, sales forces with marketing departments, and suppliers with manufacturers through PC-to-PC technology, teleconferencing, and shared databases.
Making Organizations Competitive is a comprehensive sourcebook packed with techniques for building closer relationships among organizational players. It explores, for example, how to cut down design-to-production time by building interdepartmental task forces that speed the flow of information and ideas across traditional departmental barriers; use computers to integrate sales and marketing departments, thereby producing high-quality leads, high potential targets for mailing, and coordinated follow-up procedures; establish mutually beneficial university-industry R&D ventures that produce research applicable to real-life manufacturing and design needs; and instill in employees a commitment to quality and better customer service by giving them opportunities for input and autonomy in decision making.
To Order MAKING COMPETITIVE Contributions by:
H. Igor Ansoff
Thomas G. Cummings
Terrence E. Deal
Jay R. Galbraith
Thomas G. Gunn
Edward E. Lawler III
Kenneth D. Mackenzie
Benjamin Schneider
Dave Ulrich
H. J. Zoffer