LEARNING ACROSS THE LIFE CYCLE: EXPERIMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE AMONG THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO HEADS

摘要

Guided by notions from the literature on organization learning, this paper investigates how product line experimentation and organization performance change across the careers of top managers. Its subjects are the heads who ran all the major Hollywood film studies from 1936 to 1965. The study found first, that product line experimentation declines over the course of executive tenures; second, that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between top executive tenure and an organization's financial performance; and third, that product line experimentation is more likely to benefit financial performance late in top executives' tenures.