Clockspeed : Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage

Based on extensive research he conducted at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, professor Charles H. Fine determined that fruit flies hold the key to the future of business. Not the insects themselves, actually, but the way geneticists study their extraordinarily condensed life spans to gain insight into the much more drawn-out human existence. In like manner, Fine suggests that industries with a very rapid evolutionary rate, or clockspeed, be examined for information that will benefit businesses of all kinds--as well as national economic systems, universities, and even religious institutions--although any edge that emerges may, without additional work, prove to be fleeting. In Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine lays out his resultant theories of business genetics. He focuses on "fruit fly industries" such as personal computers and information-entertainment providers and the lessons he says can be learned by dissecting their internal processes, product development procedures, and organizational arrangements. He then proposes ways that other companies can utilize the positive patterns of industry structure that appear. Those whose eyes do not glaze over at the mere thought of calculating "capital equipment obsolesce rates" should find this absorbing and thought-provoking. --Howard Rothman