TABLE OF CONTENTS Creating value at the level of a corporation, government agency, or other multi-program enterprise has long been a challenge. But when companies such as Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, and myriad less well-known enterprises are merging or restructuring, and once-familiar names have disappeared altogether, a new sense of urgency grows. How can value best be created at this level? The challenge is large, the stakeholders are many, and this is where multiple value streams come together each with independent and sometimes conflicting goals.
Practitioners and scholars have long struggled with the conflicts, disconnects, and misunderstandings that often develop among supposedly collaborating organizations. Commonly, they attribute these to direct economic conflicts or to differences in culture. But the root cause probably lies elsewhere. It may have more to do with the way value does or does not flow through such an enterprise. More specifically, it may relate to the challenges of coordinating the multiple interacting flows of value in an enterprise. Each value stream has its own set of imperatives that cannot be ignored while constructing mutually agreeable value propositions across multiple value streams. [1] Hence, value streams are the key building blocks for the multi-program enterprise and key levers for organizational transformation.
As this chapter s title suggests, we focus here on bridging across multiple value streams in both corporate and government enterprises. In the aerospace industry these are often intertwined, yet these two types of enterprise can...
