Preface
IN 1989 I WAS WORKING ON LEAD TIME REDUCTION projects at several manufacturing companies in Finland. Dr. Suzanne de Treville of the Helsinki University of Technology, who had invited me to Finland to work on these projects, showed me an article by George Stalk that had appeared a few months earlier in the Harvard Business Review. This article documented an emerging strategy of competing on speed, called time-based competition, or TBC. The article had a profound effect on me. Although I had been working in the area of lead time reduction for several years, the article changed my view of this topic. Suddenly, it put a lot of my work in perspective. Reducing lead time was no longer a shopfloor strategy relegated to the manufacturing process ...
