Lean And Mean

1994 book by Bennett Harrison challenging a widely held belief that small and medium firms or businesses (SMBs) are responsible for the majority of economic innovation, growth and job creation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennett_Harrison

Review in WiredMag.

Businesses are not becoming more entrepreneurial - rather, they are committing to an ever-deepening system of alliances.

As businesses reorganize for global production, they find ways to increase their flexibility - such as switching between suppliers. Firms do not need to be centralized in one spot, so long as they can coordinate their activities and resources.

Yet, as production becomes more complicated, it is increasingly difficult for any one firm to master all necessary skills. The result is more "networked production systems" created by strategic business alliances. The "networking" is both technical and social: it is facilitated by telecommunications, but its upshot is the growth of long-term relationships.

Networked production systems have enormous consequences. Perhaps most importantly, he argues, they contribute to a divergence between rich and poor in the global economy: the flexibility of large global firms increases their bargaining power and permits the shift of costs and risks to suppliers

Review in Kirkus Reviews

Harrison (Political Economy/Carnegie Mellon Univ.) puts paid to the widely held notion that small firms are the primary source of new jobs. Nor, he goes on to show, are bantamweights notably adept at creating, much less applying, advanced technologies. By almost any standard, according to Harrison (co-author of The Deindustrialization of America, not reviewed), large multinational corporations still dominate the marketplace.

Harrison's greatest fear is that lean may portend genuinely and persistently mean. His stated desire is ``to promote local economic development with equity,'' an objective he concedes could prove elusive in a world where regional output as often as not is remotely controlled.

To aid effective monitoring and regulation of the socioeconomic behavior of multinationals, he advocates that member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development adopt the moral equivalent of common industrial policies, a position certain to draw fire from the right