The Pin Factory

Offshoring may appear less attractive to businesses after considering a transformative strategy. Innovation and transformation diminish the advantage of lower cost offshore labor by yielding substantially more productive, transformed onshore processes that deliver the same or more output with less labor. However, the key to transformative strategy is broadening the focus of the analysis beyond a labor cost analysis, to a focus on revenues and net income.

There have been a lot of blog postings and articles written about AT&T’s iPhone ordering problems in the past week as if it spells some doom for the iPhone or AT&T. The issue with iPhone data congestion on AT&T’s 3G cell sites isn’t the end of the world for AT&T or NYC. The iPhone works [...]

Over 233 years ago Adam Smith wrote about transformation and high performing businesses. He noticed by studying Pin Factories that the successful businesses were those focused on transforming their operations. Smith wrote,
First, the improvement of the dexterity of the workmen, necessarily increases the quantity of the work he can perform; and the division of labour, [...]

The 8 December, 2009 interview by Kai Ryssdal of Nancy Koehn of the Harvard Business School ended with the following:
RYSSDAL: So when we look back on this period, on 2008-2009, what lessons will we have learned? Will we have learned anything do you think?
KOEHN: I think we’ll have learned several things. One, that we are incredibly tightly connected. [...]