This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When a hurricane shuts down production at a Unilever plant? When Dell and Apple chip manufacturers in Taiwan take weeks to recover from an earthquake? When the U.S....

When designer and computer scientist John Maeda was tapped to be president of the celebrated Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, he had to learn how to be a leader quickly. He had to transform himself from a tenured professor—with a love of argument for argument's sake and the freedom to...

Investors and analysts often need to look into a firm’s operations more deeply than traditional financial statements and models allow. This book describes newly developed tools for using operations metrics to discern and influence the valuation of a firm. It is the first to present these...

Governments around the world are deeply divided about the proper role of industrial policy, with some politicians arguing for hands-off governance and others supporting government intervention to promote "national champions"-- firms that receive government support for both political and economic...

Explicit collusion is an agreement among competitors to suppress rivalry that relies on interfirm communication and/or transfers. Rivalry between competitors erodes profits; the suppression of rivalry through collusion is one avenue by which firms can enhance profits. Many cartels and bidding...

Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book,...

Design structure matrix (DSM) is a straightforward and flexible modeling technique that can be used for designing, developing, and managing complex systems. DSM offers network modeling tools that represent the elements of a system and their interactions, thereby highlighting the system’s...

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

The MIT Sloan School of Management, as conceived by the legendary General Motors chairman Alfred P. Sloan, was founded in 1952 to draw on the scientific and technical resources of MIT and approach the problems of management with the rigorous research practices for which MIT was famous. Fifty...