How Does Management Affect Capabilities? « Organizations and Markets

Professor Postrel

How Does Management Affect Capabilities? « Organizations and Markets: "Our first insight was that it would be almost impossible to track which specific pieces of knowledge were used to accomplish which task. Think of the endless set of commonsense facts we take for granted (e.g. “users prefer fewer keystrokes” or “big pills are harder to swallow”) that bear on successful product development. Think of all the technical principles and intuitions, and the meta-principles and pattern recognition that tell us when to apply each one. If we could codify all that, we would also be able to solve the artificial intelligence problem, which seemed a bit ambitious.
Our second insight was that we could circumvent this difficulty by looking at what happens when trans-specialist understanding is missing. It turns out that the main reason why upstream specialist A needs to know something about downstream specialty B is to avoid taking actions in the A domain that screw up B’s problem solving. Classic examples are a designer releasing a design that can’t be manufactured at a profit, a marketer issuing product requirements that can’t be met, or a programmer releasing software that doesn’t work in the user’s actual environment. When one of these incidents occurs (we called them “glitches” in our 1999 Strategic Management Journal paper), the missing knowledge is a finite and specifiable thing which can often be pinpointed by parties on both sides of the interaction. Glitches are discrete events which are usually memorable and consequential; they can potentially be observed with careful interviewing and/or archival research."