I think both of those are important to avoiding core rigidities because in both cases what you are trying to do is challenge the well-worn channels through which knowledge flows into your company. Companies rely on the knowledge of other firms because their needs are becoming ever more complex. So that drives us to look for sources of expertise outside the company and to make alliances with companies that have complementary skills. But it certainly seems increasingly true that we need to have alliances with other companies to develop products that are systems-based. One of the activities I mentioned is scanning broadly.
Technical knowledge comes from all over the world.
I think we could learn something from the Japanese, who do extremely well in this regard. But then, there are small U.S. based companies that are also good scanners. I point out in the first chapter that Chaparral had brought in a hot-link technology from Poland the only place in the world that had that technology. You have to really scan the world to know where things like that are. Most U.S. companies are not very good at that.