Michael A. Cusumano

"We do not claim that any one principle of competition, organization, management, or product development Microsoft has followed is the sole source of its success or unique among companies. Instead, there is a small set of complementary strategies -- we discuss seven -- that characterize how Microsoft competes and operates. Microsoft puts each of these basic strategies into practice through another small set of complementary principles; these define a style of leadership, organization, competition, and product development that is consistent with the company's PC-programmer culture and remarkably effective in producing software products for mass markets. Moreover, though, Microsoft is unique in the way it has brought together all the elements necessary to get to the top of an enormously important industry and then stay there. We think of Microsoft's ""secrets"" as these fundamental strategies and principles of implementation.
We must emphasize that the strategies and principles we identified represent our interpretation of how Microsoft works, based on a study of the company's history and current operations, extensive interviews with its personnel, and internal documents and project data going back to the mid-1980s. We did not go into this research with any particular strategies or principles in mind, nor did Microsoft people suggest any to us directly. In this book, we devote one full chapter to each strategy:
1. Organizing and managing the company: Find smart people who know the technology and the business.
2. Managing creative people and technical skills: Organize small teams of overlapping functional specialists.
3. Competing with products and standards: Pioneer and orchestrate evolving mass markets.
4. Defining products and development processes: Focus creativity by evolving features and ""fixing"" resources.
5. Developing and shipping products: Do everything in parallel, with frequent synchronizations.
6. Building a learning organization: Improve through continuous self-critiquing, feedback, and sharing.
7. Attack the future!"… (mehr)