Book Reviews

The three books we review this month deal with important practical aspects of the new product development process. John Moran's review of a book by Robert Haavind emphasizes the importance of quality and provides many pointers on how this can be enhanced. Although the book is primarily of value for manufacturing firms, it also deals with quality for services, emphasizing, for example, the importance of including the customer in the firm's development activity. Vic Prushan reviews a book by Michael Spendolini on benchmarking, a practice that is important to the improvement of quality. This practice is applicable to any firm developing any new good or service. Finally, John Cushman reviews a book by Donald Carter and Barbara Baker on concurrent engineering, finding the book to be of greatest interest to technical people working in the development of technology-based products.     

Book Reviews

This issue provides reviews of four books and brief notes for two others. The first book that is reviewed covers services comprehensively. It traces the growth from the industrial era and attempts to project future trends. The second review is of a book written by a practitioner with the company that is frequently judged to be the new product development "gold standard." Although the book can be somewhat unfocused at times, six key lessons are enunciated. The third book covered here is about compressing time-to-market for engineered or technology-based products. Our reviewer suggests that it is most useful for experienced practitioners in larger companies. The last book is about teams. The reviewer finds it overly long but useful in its treatment of teaming among organizations.     

Schedule Emphasis of New Product Development Personnel

The emphasis personnel place on the development schedule is one factor in determining how quickly a new product will reach the market. Normally, each team member will stress different development program aspects in ways that depend on their own background, functional specialty and sense of what their management desires. In this article, Milton Rosenau describes a means to measure the emphasis an individual places on schedule and other program aspects. The results of such a measure can then be used to improve team congruity.     

SOCIAL CHALLENGES TO ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO SOCIAL ACCOUNTING

The question addressed in this paper is: Why can't we have a good measuring rod of the economic and social performance of our society? The answers are basically positive but lie mostly in the direction of (1) avoiding simplistic solutions such as turning the national income accounts into a measure of social welfare and (2) providing the elements of an information strategy to obtain such a measure or more accurately such a set of measures. The proposed information strategy highlights five activities: (1) the presentation and analysis of welfare outcomes, an activity which is analogous to but broader than “social indicators”; (2) social accounting which includes economic accounting, demographic accounting, and time-use accounting; (3) model building and operation which, unlike accounting, are concerned with behavioral or causal relationships used to explain and project welfare outcomes; (4) hypothesis testing to develop new insights into economic and social behavior; and finally (5) the building and maintenance of a data base required for carrying on the aforementioned four activities.     

Capital budgeting and delegation

As part of our ongoing research into capital budgeting processes as responses to decentralized information and incentive problems, we focus in this paper on when a level of a managerial hierarchy will delegate the allocation of capital across projects and time to the level below it. In our model, delegation is a way to save on costly investigation of proposed projects. Therefore, it is more extensive the larger are the costs of such investigations. This delegation takes advantage of the fact that the lower-level manager's preferences are assumed to be similar (though not identical) to those of the higher level.