Hasta La Ideas

Steve Denning is the former Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank and the author of a slew of business books, most recently The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. Denning currently has an excellent series of articles posted on Forbes that uses “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA” as a jumping-off point for a frank discussion on the current state of global business and manufacturing.

Denning uses his expertise to look beyond numbers—which can often lead us to draw the wrong conclusion—to see what’s really going on in the manufacturing sector and how seemingly innocuous management decisions can lead to the decline of entire industries. In the first article he touches on how Dell outsourced themselves right out of the business, why a U.S.-made Kindle couldn’t happen, the chain reaction of manufacturing decline, what makes Apple different, and seven institutions that would need to step up before we’d see a significant change in the manufacturing landscape.

Denning’s second article on the topic addresses comments made by readers, but it was his third installment that contained the point I think most relevant to industrial designers: He suggests that Dell outsourced too many critical components, allowing the suppliers to gain enough know-how to make their own complete product, but that Apple may be exempt from this pitfall in that they outsource components but remain masters of how those components go together to form a unique user experience. Denning doesn’t state that point exactly so I may be inferring too much, but give it a read and let us know what you think.

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