Operations strategy: first the hands, then the signs

In this Italian-language video, shot in a New York subway station and at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn, I talk about the Italian workers who dug the subway and about Massimo Vignelli, who designed its signs sixty years later: first the hands, then the signs. Here I bring that order into the company, drawing on an article Wickham Skinner wrote in 1969 on the relationship between strategy and manufacturing.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

This morning I went down into the New York subway and stopped to look at a sign. White on black, Helvetica, a color for every line. It seems obvious. But that system was designed by Massimo Vignelli in 1966, and it still works today, unchanged, sixty years later. Billions of people have used it without ever wondering who thought it up. And perhaps that is exactly the point. When a system really works, it becomes invisible. You do not notice it. You live in it.

I often wonder whether the same is true of companies. The best processes are the ones nobody notices. The most effective decisions are the ones that seem obvious only after someone has made them. Vignelli used to say that design is not a style, it is a language. And a language works when it stops being an obstacle and becomes the natural way of moving through things. Perhaps the best strategy is the one that resembles a good subway sign: clear, quiet, and already there before you look for it.

I have just come out of the Transit Museum here in Brooklyn, where I saw something I did not know about. There is a permanent exhibition called “Steel, Stone & Backbone,” and it tells the story of the people who physically built the New York subway. The photographs, the documents, the testimonies all say the same thing: they were Italian. Immigrants who arrived between 1900 and 1910, by the millions. They dug the tunnels, laid the tracks, worked underground in very harsh conditions. In 1890 nearly 90 percent of the workers on New York’s public works were Italian. Ninety percent. They built the physical foundations of this city with their hands.

And then, sixty years later, another Italian, the Milanese Massimo Vignelli, arrives in New York and designs the visual system of that same subway. The signs, the colors, the wayfinding. The language that still guides millions of people every day. I find it extraordinary. First the hands, then the signs. First the structure, then the system that makes it legible. It is a thread that runs through more than a century and says something profound about Italian identity: the ability to build things that last over time, whether in stone or in visual language, and that become part of the place where they are born.

First the hands: who dug the first subway

The New York Transit Museum is housed in Brooklyn, in the Court Street station, and its permanent exhibition, Steel, Stone & Backbone, tells the story of how the subway was built between 1900 and 1925. The exhibition was developed in 1997 by Thomas Harrington and updated in 2003 for the subway’s centennial (National Park Service, CRM Journal, 2005).

Construction began on March 24, 1900. On October 27, 1904, the first line opened: 9.1 miles (almost fifteen kilometers) from City Hall to 145th Street, with 28 stations (American Society of Mechanical Engineers; Railway Age, 2024). Excavation workers made up 70 percent of the subway workforce, and most of them were Italian; foremen, contractors and union leaders were largely Irish (National Park Service). These were the years of the great Italian emigration: in the first decade of the twentieth century more than two million Italians arrived in the United States (Library of Congress).

That line still carries trains. For its 120th anniversary, in 2024, special trains ran along almost all of its route (Railway Age). The network that grew from it recorded 1.282 billion trips in 2025 (MTA). This is the part of the story that in the video I call the hands: it comes before any sign, and it decides what a sign will be able to say. In a company the hands are the work of the departments: production, the warehouse, the people who assemble and the people who deliver.

A strategy should be designed after getting to know the work of the departments: it is that work that decides what the strategy can promise.

Then the signs: three networks to be read as one

The system that guides passengers today has a longer history than you can see from the platform, and up close it is more instructive. The New York network grew out of three networks, unified only in 1940, each with its own signs. In May 1966 the Transit Authority, on the recommendation of the Museum of Modern Art, gave the job to Unimark, the firm where Vignelli worked with Bob Noorda (Paul Shaw, AIGA, 2008). Noorda studied how passengers moved and marked on a diagram the points where they had to decide; the manual came out in 1970, and the first signs were black on a white background. The white on black of the 1970s and Helvetica, the standard since December 1989, came later, when the system was solid enough to change its look without losing its logic. The whole story is in the video on strategic design.

The signs arrived more than sixty years later, on a network they had not built and whose tunnels they could not move. Their job was to make it legible. In his Canon, Vignelli writes that design is not a style but a discipline, with rules of its own (The Vignelli Canon, 2010, p. 24), and the subway signs prove it: the look has changed, the discipline has remained. I describe how Vignelli judged a project in the piece on strategic clarity.

In the first two chapters of the video I say that a system that works becomes invisible, and that you live in it without noticing. I have written about this in the piece on strategic alignment. In this story, what matters is the order in which things arrived.

Skinner: manufacturing is the missing link in strategy

In May 1969, while Unimark was working on the subway manual, the Harvard Business Review published an article by Wickham Skinner, who taught production at Harvard Business School. Its title called manufacturing the missing link in corporate strategy. Skinner was thinking of American manufacturing companies, in which the factory had become a matter for technicians: in the summary the magazine uses to present the article, efficiency experts have given way to computer specialists in manufacturing, and top management “shies away from both of these technical areas.”

In 1969 an article by Wickham Skinner, of Harvard Business School, observed that few of the people who run companies notice how apparently routine manufacturing decisions end up limiting a company’s strategic options, tying it for years to an uncompetitive position.

What ties it down, the article goes on, are its “facilities, equipment, personnel, and basic controls and policies.” It is the same mechanism as in the subway, seen from the other side. A plant bought to make long runs at low cost, a warehouse organized for a certain kind of order, a habit that has taken root in a department: these decide what the company can promise its customers long before the board writes a line. If the strategy promises fast delivery in small batches and the factory is built for the opposite, the factory wins. Nobody decided that. In many Italian small and mid-sized companies, production is where the company was born, and the know-how that sets it apart lies there: ignoring production when writing the strategy means writing it without its strongest point.

Signs can reorder the structure, if they start from it

Put this way, it seems that strategy only has to record what production is able to do. The subway shows something more. Unimark’s system gave three networks a single language, and it changed the way millions of people move beneath the city. It succeeded because it had started from the network as it was, from the points where passengers had to choose.

Signs can reorder a structure, as long as they start from it: Unimark made three separately built networks readable as one, beginning with the points where passengers had to decide.

The same is true of a business strategy, which must be able to change production: new plants, a different organization of the departments, different products. It does this well if the people who design it know the work they want to change. That is why, after the first meetings with the owners and with leadership, I talk to everyone, down to the factory workers. The work on organization and culture also looks at which steps slow down a department’s work. It runs in the opposite direction from execution, where the strategy travels down into the departments and gets stuck between one and the next.

Opening the factory to an outside eye, with its delays and its habits, requires of the owners a kind of trust that I greatly respect: it means showing the work before the results.

In the video I say that this story tells us something about Italian identity. The hands that dug were mostly Italian, alongside Irish foremen; the signs came from a Milanese working with a Dutchman who had settled in Milan. What they have in common is the way they have lasted: the tunnels still carry trains, and the logic of the signs has survived more than one change of look.

What to do and what not to do

• Spend time in the departments before writing down what the company promises its customers.
• Ask the people who work in production which everyday decisions limit what can be sold.
• Discuss investments in plants at board level as strategic choices.
• Do not leave production to the technicians alone.
• Do not change the brand, the signs or the plan to cover up work that cannot live up to the promise.

Sources

• Wickham Skinner, “Manufacturing, Missing Link in Corporate Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, May 1969. https://hbr.org/1969/05/manufacturing-missing-link-in-corporate-strategy
• Harvard Business Review Store, product page for Wickham Skinner’s article. https://store.hbr.org/product/manufacturing-missing-link-in-corporate-strategy/69312
• New York Transit Museum, “Steel, Stone & Backbone: Building New York’s Subways,” permanent exhibition. https://www.nytransitmuseum.org/exhibits
• National Park Service, review of the exhibition “Steel, Stone, and Backbone: Building New York’s Subways 1900–1925,” CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 2005, p. 145. https://www.nps.gov/crps/crmjournal/Summer2005/reviewexhibit3.pdf
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers, “Interborough Rapid Transit System,” Landmark no. 31. https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmarks/31-interborough-rapid-transit-system
• David Peter Alan, “New York Celebrates 120 Years of the Subway,” Railway Age, November 1, 2024. https://www.railwayage.com/passenger/rapid-transit/new-york-celebrates-120-years-of-the-subway/
• Library of Congress, “The Great Arrival,” in Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History. https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/the-great-arrival/
• MTA, “Subway and bus ridership for 2025.” https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/ridership/2025
• Paul Shaw, “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway,” AIGA, November 18, 2008. https://www.aiga.org/the-mostly-true-story-of-helvetica-and-the-new-york-city-subway
• Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich, 2010 (reprinted 2015), p. 24; Italian edition: Il canone Vignelli, Postmedia Books, 2012.