Manufacturing's Most Influential Thinkers & Doers

摘要

Think about the people who have had the greatest impact on manufacturing during the past 35 years, the first 35 years of Industry Week's existence. It's much easier to come up with names of doers than of thinkers. Four years after he was succeeded by Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric Co.'s John F. "Jack" Welch Jr. is foremost among the doers. During his 20-year tenure as chairman and CEO, he promoted decision-focused "workouts" to solve problems, championed Six Sigma, periodically eval- uated executive performance and sent the bottom 10% packing, and insisted that if a business wasn't No. 1 or No. 2 in its market, it be fixed, sold or closed. However, during the past 35 years, manufacturing has had its share of seminal thinkers as well. Among the more familiar names is Harvard University's Michael Porter, who asserts the primacy of strategy in business success. Also at Harvard, there's Clayton Christensen whose notions of managing disruptive technological changes challenges some of Porter's ideas about the constancy of strategy. Less widely known but still powerful among the thinkers is Eliyahu M. Goldratt, an unconstrained idea-man whose Theory of Constraints helps manufacturers remove broken links from their value chains and improve performance and profits. Indeed, three-quarters of IW's Top 25 Best Plants in 2004 said they used Goldratt's theory as a tool to help them improve performance.