Public services management: activities, initiatives and limits to learning

Article Abstract:

Private sector-style management initiatives to ensure UK public services managers' learning from private sector management practice are examined, and their rationale questioned. The lack of a coherent, systematic and agreed view of what constitutes 'management' and 'managerial work' in the private sector is discussed. It is argued that there are reasons for believing that the particular character and organizational contexts of public services will require different managerial behaviours. The manner in which experimental managerial initiatives in some public services have shifted into mandatory innovations is examined. Such innovations can be incompatible with the values of those managing in the public service, who frequently fail to recognize the advantages of late innovation, incrementalism and circumspection. In public services particularly, many managerial activities are the province of 'non managerial' staff. Though frequently not considered, the values of these de facto managers may be central to the progress of such innovations. It is further argued that risk-taking as applied in a business context is inappropriate to the degree that public services managers must be concerned with the common weal, equity and accountability. The article concludes with a detailed research agenda to support the need to recognize public services management as a rich and varied area of managerial behaviour in its own right. Its character and variation warrants further investigation as a basis for formulating more appropriate management concepts against which to measure public services managers' behaviour and performance. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

United Kingdom, Civil service, Municipal services, Great Britain

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Learning from Honda

Article Abstract:

The case of the Honda Motor Company has been cited frequently in the strategic management literature. A review reveals that Honda's strategy has been used to illustrate and support apparently contradictory positions on a series of conceptual dichotomies, namely analytical planning versus learning, market positioning versus resource-based and, within the last of these, core competencies versus core capabilities. A critical analysis of this literature reveals empirical inaccuracies and a focus on Honda's strategic successes to the neglect of its failures. More significantly, explanations and general strategy implications are couched in terms of reductionist one-side theories, a tendency which is only deepened when strategy thinkers debate 'the meaning of Honda.' This theoretical approach is particularly ill suited to Honda, an important strategic capability of which appears to be precisely the reconciliation of dichotomous management concepts. Western strategy thinkers have therefore missed the opportunity to develop a more appropriate and productive paradigm for learning from Honda. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Motor vehicles and car bodies, Automobiles, Automobile Manufacturing, Case studies, Automobile industry, Honda Motor Company Ltd., Strategic planning (Business)

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Limits of concurrency

Article Abstract:

Concurrent engineering is being used as a method to reduce product development leadtime. However, it is shown that there are limits to concurrency even in the simplified condition in which concurrency is represented as the number of design modules to be performed in parallel. As complications such as commmunication linkages are introduced into the model, it is demonstrated that the expected project completion time is minimized at a finite number of modules. This decreases as the problem becomes more complex.

Product Development, Analysis, Industrial design, Concurrent engineering

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