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Rating: 
Summary: Long on Hype short on answers
Review: Clockspeed is a good example of the thirst for books on eCommerce. The premise of the book is largely based around a cute concept "clockspeed" with a call to concurrently engineer process, product, and supply chains. All good premises, however, the author does little to tell you how those should fit together in pragmatic terms. The book is most helpful for people in manufacturing where all of the examples are from and not people working in the services markets, where clockspeed has some real meaning. A visit to the authors web site is futher demoralizing as Fine has decided to set up a consulting practice around the concept and book. Overall this is not the best book I've read on working in the electronic economy.
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Summary: A fascinating exploration of the dynamics of competition.
Review: Clockspeed succeeds at both providing deeper insights than a typical business book and in being very interesting to read. Fine explores the fascinating dynamics of competition and competitive advantage, and explains puzzles like why the computer industry has gone from being highly vertically integrated to being a disintegrated network of competing and cooperating firms. Going beyond description and explanation, Clockspeed provides concrete steps managers can take to ensure that their companies survive industry turbulence.
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Summary: Supply Chain: design should come first
Review: Fine's book creates clear connection among Supply Chain, Product Development and Manufacturing activities. MIT's Professor Fine establishes an operational and strategic link among those company's environment. The book put in a plain text how to analyze you supply chain and how to design it accordly a strategy view. Finally, Supply Chain Design is proclaimed as being essential to assure competitive advantage and to sustain the company's progress. If you want to really understand supply chain, it is a book that you must read!
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Summary: Top Speed !
Review: If you think there is no connection between the ordinary fruit fly and a modern jet aircraft- Think again. Both these fly ! May be at different speeds- Here is an author who uses the remarakable example of the study of the fruit fly to derive powerful lessons for Business. His concepts on out-sourcing, Supply chain value analysis, volatality amplification and "clock speed" read like "The Ten Commandments" for Business.Powerful ideas explained well with simple examples. Long live the fruit fly !
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Summary: Crucial for anyone in supply chain field
Review: It would be a mistake to be employed in some supply chain capacity and *not* read this book. I believe that it offers an intriguing set of solid examples of how incorporating supply chain management into strategy discussions has helped some companies profit at the expense of others. Some commenters have noted that examples seem anecdotal. I tend to think that Fine's approach here, in going into depth with just a few examples, is a richer basis upon which to draw conclusions. You don't necessarily need a statistically significant sample set in order to gain insights into how to conduct strategy. I would also take issue with one reviewer's note that it is overly geared towards manufacturing, rather than services. Managing supply chains and conducting make-buy decisions are clearly the province of operations. But shouldn't consulting services develop precisely those areas of expertise in order to assist their biggest clients? A note of disclosure: I took Fine's course on this subject while at MIT. While I wouldn't trade having been in that graduate seminar for 100 books, if you can't take the course, at least read the book! Doing so brought back the pleasure for me of being in his class.
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Summary: Pay Attention or be left behind
Review: Not only did I find this book valuable, I sent copies to several of my clients. I have spent a career trying to help first employers and then clients to understand the basic concept of change, the impact of understanding the rate of change and implications of change. I thought that Prof. Fine did a more than credible job of putting the subject into words of one syllable which will help more people understand what it will take to succeed in our new faster changing world. My only complaint with the book was the lack of importance and recognition that it places on the ultimate consumer who drives change. Without a true understanding of the consumer all else will be for naught.
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Summary: Seminal Work in Supply Chain Design
Review: Professor Fine makes a tremendously strong and lucid case for utilizing supply chain design as a functional catalyst in optimizing business strategy and evolution. In a world of chronic oversupply and fear, Professor Fine sheds light on how managers and corporations can take control of their destiny instead of destiny and fate taking control of the managers and corporations.
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Summary: Read every page
Review: This book has some really interesting threads around supply chain design competency, clockspeed, and learning from industry fruit flies, but the real value of the book is in between all of that. For years, there have been wonderful insights into technology strategy, product architecture, manufacturing strategy, etc. etc. roaming around the halls of MIT and throughout journal articles. The only way to really tap this depth of knowledge is by being there. Charlie has woven these thoughts, ideas, and concepts throughout the book rather seemlessly. If you read the book carefully, and think very hard about some of the nuggets throughout the book, I'm sure it will be worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Read every page
Review: This book has some really interesting threads around supply chain design competency, clockspeed, and learning from industry fruit flies, but the real value of the book is in between all of that. For years, there have been wonderful insights into technology strategy, product architecture, manufacturing strategy, etc. etc. roaming around the halls of MIT and throughout journal articles. The only way to really tap this depth of knowledge is by being there. Charlie has woven these thoughts, ideas, and concepts throughout the book rather seemlessly. If you read the book carefully, and think very hard about some of the nuggets throughout the book, I'm sure it will be worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Block That Metaphor
Review: Which of the following is the most important competence of an organization? A. Leadership B. Customer service C. Market dominance D. Innovation E. Supply chain design If you chose E, then you and Charles Fine would get along famously. Fine believes that everything can be explained and even controlled by optimizing the supply chain. Industry evolution, competitive advantage, vertical integration, you name it: all are grist to the mill of supply chain dynamics. And as you trek through increasingly dense thickets of his book, studying such exotic flora as design structure matrices and 3-D concurrent engineering, Fine accompanies you in the role of pith-helmeted guide, discoursing upon the ineluctable primacy of his favorite subject. You don't have to be a convert to the cult of the supply chain to see value in this book. But you do have to love metaphors. Fearing lest the reader find the subject a trifle dry, the author has chosen to frame his arguments in terms of genetics. In industries with faster clockspeeds - the rapid supply chain evolutions experienced by makers of personal computers, semiconductors, and even running shoes - companies are fruit flies, whose evolution we can observe from egg to carcass. Only the fittest and most adaptable survive, largely by applying the power of the double helix of business. The DNA can be mapped, the molecules engineered, the genes enriched and cloned, and so on. Illustration by analogy has its place, but over the long haul it palls and wearies. What should have been a straightforward book on supply chains ends up distracting with a glib vocabulary. Can a Mobius-strip cycle between the integrated and the modular be termed a "double helix" if it doesn't establish a genetic code or look like a corkscrew ladder? Should we learn from fruit fly companies because their clockspeed is conveniently short, or because every company's clockspeed is accelerating? If real-life fruit flies are studied because their genetic structure resembles that of humans, are we wise to assume that Intel has the same genetic structure as Boeing? What is a corporate genetic structure, anyway? Clockspeed would tick along more convincingly if it lost the first sixty-eight pages. There'd still be plenty of arguments - whether Fine's observations apply to non-manufacturing organizations, whether the laws of the supply chain are truly predictive - but they would at least be the right arguments, the sort of thoughts a stimulating work provokes. Unfortunately, the siren call of metaphor has lured an otherwise seaworthy vessel onto rocky shores. By the time the ship is put to sea again, you may have lost your taste for the voyage.
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