the delta project 
The development of The Delta Model has generated a significant amount of research and thinking into the drivers of sustainable profitability for businesses and corporations — both from the early efforts that led to the formulation of the core concepts to the considerable amount of follow on research spawned by the publication of this new approach to formulating business strategy.
The extensive research supporting The Delta Model had its foundation in the Delta Group, a number of senior executives from major corporations along with members of the MIT/Sloan School of Management faculty who sat down several years ago to discuss the forces confronting businesses worldwide and the absence of business frameworks to address them. The group included Skip LeFauve, CEO of Saturn; Gerhard Schulmeyer, then CEO of Asea Brown Boveri and now President and CEO of Siemens Corporation;. Iain Anderson, CEO of Chemical Coordination at Unilver; Judy Lewent, CFO of Merck; and Bert Morris, Chief Executive of Operations at National Westminster Bank. The Sloan faculty who participated included Charles Fine, Arnoldo Hax, Henry Jacoby, Thomas Magnanti, Robert McKersie, Stewart Myers, John Rockart, Edgar Schein, Michael Scott Morton, and John Van Maanen.
As the original concept of The Delta Model began to emerge, so did a broad base of research, including analysis of over 100 US and international corporations, the research theses of over 70 graduate students, the development of case studies as part of the Sloan School masters and executive programs and the on-going strategy consulting work at Dean & Company. Much of this research is captured The Delta Project, co-authored by Dean Wilde of Dean & Company and Arnoldo Hax of the Sloan School. A number of theses were used in selected chapters in the book: C. C. Lees’s ‘An Application of the Delta Model: Developing Strategies for Singapore Post’; Patrick Preux’s ‘Customer Targeting, Sustainable Competitive Advantage and Core Competencies’; and Robert Browning and Winfried Holz’s ‘The Virtual Utility: Strategic Choices for Utilities in the Restructured Electric Industry’.
In addition to The Delta Project, the results of these efforts have also been published in other academic journals, including:
The Delta Model - Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy
- Sloan Management Review
Vol. 40, No. 2 pp. 11-28, 1999
The Delta Model - Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy
- European Management Journal
Vol. 9, No. 4 pp. 379-391, 2001
Finally, research involving the application of The Delta Model continues today, through on-going graduate work at top business schools, consulting work in the pragmatic and formidable world of business at Dean & Company and a growing number of businesses worldwide.
