Michael Cusumano
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
He specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in the computer software industry, as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. He teaches courses on The Software Business and Digital Platforms as well as Advanced Strategic Management. Cusumano is fluent in Japanese and has lived and worked in Japan for seven years, and received two Fulbright Fellowships and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for studying at Tokyo University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Imperial College, Tokyo University, Hitotsubashi University, the University of St. Gallen, and Ludwig Maximilians University. Cusumano has consulted for some 90 companies and organizations around the world, including Cisco, Ericsson, Fiat, Ford, Fujitsu, GE, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NASA, Nokia, Philips, and Toshiba. He is a former director of Patni Computer Systems (sold to iGate-Apax in 2011 for $1.2 billion) as well as several other public and private companies. He is on the advisory board of Fixstars Corp., a Japanese developer of high-performance computing applications relying on video-game microprocessors and blade servers. He has served as editor-in-chief and chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review and writes a column on Technology Strategy and Management for Communications of the ACM. He was named one of the most influential people in technology and IT by Silicon.com in 2009.
nacss nacsee 2014 keynote speaker
Professor Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in the MIT Engineering Systems Division.
Cusumano has published 9 books and more than 70 articles. His latest book, Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy & Innovation in an Uncertain World (2010, based on the 2009 Oxford Clarendon Lectures), was named one of the top business books of 2011 by Strategy + Business magazine, with translations into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Italian. Cusumano received a BA from Princeton in 1976 and a PhD from Harvard in 1984. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Production and Operations Management at the Harvard Business School during 1984-86. Keynote Presentation: Japanese Firms and Staying Power This lecture presents a discussion of Japan’s rise and decline as an economic superpower through the lens of Professor Michael Cusumano’s most recent book, titled Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World (Oxford, 2010), written for the Oxford University Clarendon Lectures in Management. The focus is on why it is difficult to identify “best practices” in management and why Japanese firms such as Toyota as well as firms in many nations have had trouble remaining competitive over long periods of time. Japanese firms have done well on some enduring management principles but less well on others. Rather than an absolute decline in performance, however, Professor Cusumano argues that it is mostly improvement by firms in other countries such as the United States, China, and Korea over the past 25 years that have led to a relative decline in performance by Japanese firms and the Japanese economy overall.
Keynote Session Friday, September 12, 2014 09:30-10:15 Grand Ballroom
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