The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Robert I. Sutton & Jeffrey Pfeffer

Author:Robert I. Sutton & Jeffrey Pfeffer [Sutton, Robert I.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Published: 1999-10-04T14:00:00+00:00

They [Hewlett and Packard] firmly believed that if a company provided a great work environment, trusted its employees, and gave employees the authority to make decisions, then the company’s employees would value this commitment and develop loyalty to the company resulting in higher morale and more productivity than could be accomplished by other companies.9

Recently, however, the company has outsourced more and more of its manufacturing activities and has come to rely more on temporary employees and contract programmers. At one point, in the early 1990s, the company was featured on a 60 Minutes television program for its use of illegal aliens furnished by a so-called body shop. Hewlett-Packard has been investigated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Labor Department because of its use of contract workers from India.

What’s wrong with outsourcing manufacturing and using temporary help and contract labor (who typically earn much less and do not receive benefits) in order to make budget numbers? In the first place, “outsourcing important electronic components” means that “HP no longer has a manufacturing feedback mechanism in-house from which it can gain information about the quality of its hardware designing capabilities in terms of manufacturability, quality, defects and costs.”10 Outsourcing manufacturing can in the end inhibit the ability to learn about product design because of the separation of design from manufacturing across organizational boundaries. Perhaps even more important, as a case study concluded, this practice sends some important symbolic messages:

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