In five pages the product development and project management woes suffered by Campbell's in 1988 as detailed in Harvard Business School CAse 9-690-051 is discussed. Two sources are cited in the bibliography.
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development and project management in the late 1980s seems to be better described by the more humorous aspects of the late 1960s drug culture. George Carlin could have made
an immensely entertaining routine of the description. One can almost envision a boardroom scene: "Wow, man, this project sure is taking a
long time. Wonder how long its gonna take?" A possible reply: "Yeah, all that equipments been sitting there almost two years and hasnt rolled a can of
soup off itself yet." Two steps forward, three steps back. Thankfully, the new management at Campbell Soup had enough awareness of the
outside world to think to look toward it for help. To its credit, long-standing Campbell Soup management was open to suggestions and not insistent on holding to the cadence
of business of the preceding half century. Management Structure Jim Elsner was absolutely correct in
wondering whether Campbells engineering and marketing structures were up to handling changes in the companys market. Clearly, they were not. Neither apparently had kept abreast of the changes
occurring in all of US manufacturing throughout the 1980s. The changes had been born years before and came to a head in the wake of the 1973-74 worldwide oil
crisis, when American car buyers discovered that "made in Japan" no longer translated to terms conveying inferior quality at a cheap price. As
described by Gill and Wheelwright (1990), only the strength of Campbells highly respected brand and its overwhelming dominance of its market segment had kept the companys products performing as well