As companies move to the frontier, they can
often improve on multiple dimensions of performance at the same time. For example,
manufacturers that adopted the Japanese practice of
rapid changeovers in the 1980s were able to
lower cost and improve differentiation simultaneously. What were once believed to be
real trade-offs—between defects and costs, for
example—turned out to be illusions created by
poor operational effectiveness. Managers have
learned to reject such false trade-offs.