Charles H. Fine

Charles H. Fine is the Chrysler LGO Professor at MIT Sloan and the founding President and Dean of Asia School of Business. He was a founding co-director of both MIT’s Communications Futures Program and the Tata Center for Technology and Design at MIT. For over 30 years, Professor Fine has taught at MIT Sloan courses in Operations Strategy, Supply Chain Management, Quality Management, and Innovation. Professor Fine’s recent research focuses on the development of principles for entrepreneurial companies to build operations strategies and capabilities consistent with their business objectives.

His previous work addressed strategic supply chain design principles for fast-clockspeed manufacturing and service industries. Professor Fine’s work has supported design and improvement of supply chain relationships for companies in electronics, automotive, aerospace, communications, and consumer products. Professor Fine also teaches and consults widely with such clients as 3M, Accenture, Agile Software, Alcan, BellSouth, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bombardier, Caterpillar, Chrysler, Delphi Automotive, Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, Embraer, Fluor, GE, GM, Goodyear, HP, Honeywell, Intel, Kodak, Lucent, Mercury Computer, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, NCR, Nokia, Nortel, Oracle, Polaroid, PTC, Research-in-Motion, RollsRoyce, Sematech, Teradyne, Toyota, TRW, Unilever, Volkswagen, Volvo, and Walsin Lihwa.

He has also served on the board of directors for Greenfuel Technologies Corporation, a biotechnology company that he co-founded, and Brightstar Corporation which was purchased by Sprint. Professor Fine has also served for over a decade as co-director of an executive education program, Driving Strategic Innovation, which is a joint venture between MIT Sloan and IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Professor Fine is the author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage (1998) and the co-author of Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility (2017) co-written with Venkat Sumantran and David Gonsalvez. He is also a prolific writer of industry articles on quality management, flexible manufacturing, supply chain management, and operations strategy.