Mark Bonchek and Chris Fussell’s Harvard Business Review blog post, Can Bigger Be Faster? in the Harvard Business Review was very interesting. They suggest that there is often a trade-off between size and speed. Large corporations get efficiency with economies of scale, but are often slow to adapt. Smaller companies can easily change .
However large businesses also want to be able to adapt quickly to changes in the market, and this post suggested that companies looking to do so should look to an unlikely place for guidance, the US military. It then proceeded to list a number of recent changes in the military that allowed it to remain large while increasing its agility and speed of adaptation. This was interesting because a number of the changes that the US military employed are very similar to Zara’s supply chain operations as discussed in class.
For example: They state that in order to increase speed of adaptation the organization has to build more internal relationships. The special operations unit of the army did this by removing the original structure of each individual only connecting with his or her boss, peers, and direct reports, and instead established a “team of teams” structure.
Less of this >
And more of this>
This increased connection and relationships is evident in Zara’s operations through the communication from store owners to designers, allowing their speedy creation of current styles.