Abstract
A historic change is occuring in today's competitive environment, one that demands an equally historic response from managers. In the past, managers competing on low cost needed to concentrate on production—hierarchical structures, specialized process capabilities, systems, and meeting the demands of large, growing markets—while managers seeking to differentiate their product needed to focus on invention—introducing new products and processes, fluid structure, malleable systems. But today, managers must be positioned to build an organization that combines the best of mass production and invention. They must create a new kind of organization—a dynamically stable organization that is capable of serving the widest range of product demands (dynamic) while building on the firm's long-term process capabilities and know-how (stability).
Keywords
Flexibility (engineering)Process (computing)Production (economics)Product (mathematics)BusinessFocus (optics)Process managementOrganizational structureComputer scienceIndustrial organizationMarketingManagementEconomics
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Publication Info
- Year
- 1991
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 53-66
- Citations
- 145
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
Andrew C. Boynton,
Bart Victor
(1991).
Beyond Flexibility: Building and Managing the Dynamically Stable Organization.
California Management Review
, 34
(1)
, 53-66.
https://doi.org/10.2307/41166683
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.2307/41166683