Practices work best in coherent bundles; partial adoption underperforms.
Milgrom and Roberts's 1990 finding: lean manufacturing, flexible machinery, cross-training and supplier integration reinforce each other, so adopting one or two produces worse results than adopting none.
In practice
- A firm buys flexible machinery and keeps its narrow job descriptions, and the machinery is used as though it were fixed.
- A hospital adopts electronic records without changing the ward round, and the records become a typing task rather than a clinical tool.