EMPOWERMENT: HOW IT WORKS
One of the most famous and successful stories of empowerment concerned AT&T's development of the 4200 cordless phone back in the late 1980s.
…cross-functional teams of engineers, manufacturers and marketers were formed with authority to make every decision on how the product would work, look, be made and cost. The key was to set rigid speed requirements for freezing all specs. Because the team did not need to send each decision up the line for approval, it could meet those strict deadlines. With this new approach, AT&T cut development time for the 4200 phone from two years to just one year while lowering costs and increasing quality.
− B. Dumaine, Fortune, February 13, 1989.
A similar story was told by the Technical ...
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