The return map: tracking product teams

With a new product, time is now more valuable than money. The costs of conceiving and designing a product are less important to its ultimate success than timeliness to market. One of the most important ways to speed up product development is through interfunctional teamwork. The "Return Map," developed at Hewlett-Packard, provides a way for people from different functions to triangulate on the product development process as a whole. It graphically represents the contributions of all team members to the moment when a project breaks even. It forces the team to estimate and re-estimate the time it will take to perform critical tasks, so that products can get out fast. It subjects the team to the only discipline that works, namely, self-discipline. The map is, in effect, a graph representing time and money, where the time line is divided into three phases: investigation, development, and manufacturing and sales. Meanwhile, costs are plotted against time--as are revenues when they are realized after manufacturing release. Within these points of reference, four novel metrics emerge: Break-Even-Time, Time-to-Market, Break-Even-After-Release, and the Return Factor. All metrics are estimated at the beginning of a project to determine its feasibility, then they are tracked carefully while the project evolves to determine its success. Missed forecasts are inevitable, but managers who punish employees for missing their marks will only encourage them to estimate conservatively, thus building slack into a system meant to eliminate slack. Estimates are a team responsibility, and deviations provide valuable information that spurs continuous investigation and improvement.     

Purposeful Unintended Consequences with Innovative Derivatives

We suggest that the use of traditional market, outcome, and process controls for innovative derivatives trading may not provide adequate safeguards for clients, investors, or the entire financial system to control “purposeful unintended consequences.” We propose a more cautious examination of this aspect of the financial system using a combination of perspectives from finance and technology/innovation management. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The role of development in global fertility decline

At the first intergovernmental global Population Conference at Bucharest in 1974, delegates from the Third World argued that rapid population growth would only be controlled when a more equitable relationship was established between the More and Less Developed Countries, leading to accelerated social and economic development in the latter. Over the subsequent quarter of a century this perspective has been progressively displaced as the dominant paradigm by the view that sustained fertility decline can be accomplished through good quality family planning programmes in the context of gender-sensitive social policies, including formal education. This paper is an attempt to establish whether the abandonment of the Bucharest ideology is justified on the basis of subsequent theoretical developments in fertility studies, and by global demographic trends over the period.It is concluded from an examination of the role of development in the historical demographic transition in Europe that the role of contraceptive diffusion is exaggerated, and economic growth and the distribution of its product unjustifiably neglected in the dominant theoretical position. The evidence points to a close negative correlation between income distribution and fertility, at national and regional levels. However, fertility decline is also sometimes driven by poverty, but evidence and theory point to the likelihood of such change being both partial and reversible.Alternative approaches to fertility explored since 1974 include the institutional approach, especially the transition from the extended to the nuclear family, and the ideational approach, which stresses the cultural significance of children and marginalises the impact of economic change on fertility. These perspectives, the validity of which is conditionally acknowledged, do little if anything to detract from the overall conclusion that the dominant factor in fertility decline is equitably distributed improvement in material standards of living.The paper concludes with speculation that future trends in population growth will be driven by the economic patterns emerging from the ongoing liberalisation of trade and investment under the aegis of globalisation.     

Discussion of 'House prices, money, credit, and the macroeconomy' by Charles Goodhart and Boris Hofmann

Goodhart and Hoffman aim to examine causal and other links betweenhouse prices, liquidity, and activity, and this note commentson their results. One part of the mechanism is via wealth—butarguably house-price changes have little net impact on wealth,although there are collateral effects. The authors clearly establishstrong empirical links between the variables examined. The mainpractical issues are to do with identification of the sourceof shocks and therefore on the interpretation of the results.     

The 1997 Election: Can an Improving Economy Secure a Fifth Tory Term?

The current government is in deep electoral trouble. Nothing is certain in politics, but it still seems very likely the Tories will be defeated by New Labour this spring. Yet the economy is in fine shape – inflation and interest rates are at historically low levels, economic growth is proceeding at a respectable rate, and unemployment continues to fall. Why won’t the electorate reward the government? In this article Simon Price argues that the Tories lost their reputation for economic competence in 1992 and this has swayed the public’s opinion.     

Analysis of wage differentials by gender and ethnicity in the public sector

This study investigates the source of wage differentials between blacks, Hispanics, and whites, and between women and men, in metropolitan Dade County (Florida) government, and draws out the implications of this analysis for affirmative action planning. Our distinctive finding is that the primary factor causing observed wage differentials by ethnicity is the sorting of people across occupational categories. Wage decompositions reveal that for males, 70 percent, 88 percent, and 47 percent of the wage gaps between white and black, white and Hispanic, and Hispanic and black, respectively, are attributable to occupation. For females, the corresponding figures are 56 percent, 58 percent, and 51 percent. When comparing men and women of the same ethnic group, occupational employment patterns are found to be an important factor accounting for lower average female wages, yet within major occupational groups women seem to be receiving higher wages (on average) than men.