How to tell stories in graphical way

With his books on how to present data in a graphical way, Edward Tufte has taught many of us to be more creative in how we try to communicate a story based on quantitative data. Here is a short video that explains the power of communicating complex data in a graphical way. Tufte appears in the video.

David Gonski on Leadership

Gonski is a towering figure of Australian life. But his ideas of leadership apply everywhere in the Western world. To appreciate a bit more Gonski’s words, read this profile on him.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

This is a very thought-provoking Ted talk on happiness and how we construct our judgement of happiness. TED summarizes: Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently.

One of the interesting facts that he reports based on a Gallup survey of Americans is this:  People who make more than $60,000 do not experience more happiness as they make more money. Above this threshold, money does not make you happy. Below this threshold ever dollar less will make decrease your experience of happiness. This leads Kahneman to remark:  “Money does not buy happiness. But lack of money causes misery.”

AOL tries to reinvent its business model

AOL, whose dial-up internet business was destroyed by fast cable, DSL and not mobile phone internet connections connections (see graph) is trying to reinvent itself as a content company. It was to write local news and take the Huffington Post global.  Read details on Economist.com:  AOL’s second life.

SM4 Course Outline

Strategic Management 4 is all about the need for an organisation to revisit and redefine its business model in response to, or in anticipation of, sustained poor performance.

Download Full Course outline.

Successful Entrepreneurs Minimize Risk

Many scholars see entrepreneurs as action-oriented individuals who use rules of thumb and other mental heuristics to make decisions, but who do little systematic planning and analysis. In this new article, Deepak Sardana and I argue that what distinguishes successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs is precisely that the former vary their decision-making styles, sometimes relying on heuristics and sometimes relying on systematic analysis. In our proposed framework, successful entrepreneurs assess their level of expertise and the level of ambiguity in a particular decision context and then tailor their decision-making process to reduce risk. Download the article here.

Why Dell is going provide to turn-around its business

Michael Dell believes that the stock market will be able to stomach further profit declines that are required to make investments for the turnaround.

Mr. Dell told the board that the only way out involved changes in the company’s business model and expensive investment in new products and services. “Implementing such initiatives would require additional investments that could weaken earnings and cause greater volatility in the performance of the common stock,” the filing said Mr. Dell argued in a Dec. 6 meeting.

“Mr. Dell stated his belief that such initiatives, if undertaken as a public company, would be poorly received by the stock market because they would reduce near-term profitability, raise operating expenses and capital expenditures, and involve significant risk.”

Source: WSJ.com

Michael Dell: I did not see rapid decline of PC market coming

To win more time to turn around Dell, Michael Dell with the help of a private equity partners is taking Dell Computer private again. One of the reason the turnaround since 2007 has not been sufficient is that tablets have eaten into the market for PC in a way that Dell did not expect. The WSJ reports: “When asked in a 2011 interview with The Wall Street Journal what surprised him most since he returned as Dell CEO in 2007, Mr. Dell said the rise of tablets had been unexpected for him.

“I didn’t completely see that coming,” he said, before adding that he didn’t anticipate business users would give up PCs soon.”

More...

Microsoft Offers Office in the Cloud and a New Price Model

The WSJ reports: “Microsoft’s newest version of Office, available starting Tuesday, is a radical change from the past. For starters, Office 365 has a surprising new price model: It is available as a subscription that can automatically renew each year, if you choose. This new system constantly updates program features year round. Every time you open a program in Office, you will be running the latest version.”

Syllabus for Wharton MGMT 782 Course Fall 2012

Syllabus is available for download here: MGMT-782 Syllabus

Tim Cook - Time’s Almost Person of the Year

Time had nominated Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO as a candidate for the Person of the Year. Will Cook be able to make Apple come out with another revolutionary product, revealing to us what Steve Jobs saw in Cook. In any case, here is how Cook was recruited by Jobs to Apple.

Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving. But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”

Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”

Full Story on Time.com

Jeff Bezos on how to build organizations for innovation

Here are Bezos thoughts on n how to build organizations for innovation:

A willingness to fail and to be misunderstood “then what you can do is you can ramp up your rate of experimentation”. “So successful inventions [are] inventions that customers care about. It’s actually relatively easy to invent things that customers don’t care about, but successful invention, if you want to do a lot of that, you basically have to increase your rate of experimentation.

“And that you can think of as a process: how do you go about organising your systems, your people, all of your assets, your own daily life and how you spend time, how do you organise those things to increase your rate of experimentation because not all of your experiments are going to work.”

Bezos advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is “never chase the hot thing”. “That’s like trying to catch the wave, and you’ll never catch it. You need to position yourself and wait for the wave.”

From CIO Magazine

CEO of Blackberry articulates how the company will regain its marketshare

BBC Documentary on Facebook

The Hollywood movies about Facebook gave us an outline of the history Zuckerberg and the firm he founded. While this BBC documentary retells some of the facts from the Hollywood film, it brings to light many other interesting features of the facebook phenomenon.

How HP got duped into overpaying billions for Autonomy

HP once was the icon of good management. But for the past 10 years it has gone through several CEOs and the middle of a turnaround has to write off $9 billion dollars because it acquisition of Autonomy turned out to be a fiasco. HP alleges that Autonomy mis-represented its financial worth. The founder of Autonomy claims that HP destroyed Autonomy within one year.
Read the stories in

Dealbook New York Times

WSJ.com

Economist.com

But here is also a voice that articulates that if you are buying a company to secure your future, many deals will go wrong but some may go right and prevent you from becoming irrelevant.
Acquisitions is like doing R&D with a high failure rate.

The co-development of industrial sectors and academic disciplines

A model that conceptualizes the development of academic disciplines and related industries as intimately linked is presented. It predicts that the relative strength of a national industry which has a significant input on science or engineering knowledge is causally related to the strength of the nation’s relevant science or engineering discipline and vice versa. At national level, the model predicts that, over longer periods a nation cannot remain weak in one domain and strong in the other. It identifies the conditions under which government intervention is likely to be effective. A case study of synthetic dyes in the period 1857–1914 illustrates how these positive feedback processes led Germany and Switzerland to become strong in both organic chemistry and the dye industry, while the UK and France declined in both domains and the USA remained relatively weak in both. A shorter case study of biotechnology supports the predictions made by the model. Download Article in pdf. Read article on web in html.

10 Management insights courtesy of Carol Tice

Carol Tice summarized the 10 lessons in recent management books.

1. Instead of hiring people with fancy resumes, hire people who fit your culture and are teachable.
2. Build a strong brand and don’t change it.
3. Focus all your products on the consumer by studying and listening to customers and innovating accordingly.
4. Appoint a DRI, or Directly Responsible Individual, for every task.
5. Create a confrontational workplace culture where workers feel free to challenge others’ opinions.
6. Have a system of secrecy that builds excitement and a sense of ownership—from launching projects in an outbuilding that flies a pirate flag to erecting walls around off-limits “lockdown rooms.”
7. Create a recognition culture. Novak was once horrified to find a 30-year company executive who only heard how great people thought his contributions were a few weeks before his retirement. Now, Yum! managers all over the world give out unique recognition awards, from miniature Taj Mahal statues to rubber chickens.
8. To lead people and achieve big goals, ask three questions: What’s the single biggest thing you can imagine that will grow your business or change your life? Who do you need to affect, influence or take with you to be successful? What prescriptions, habits or beliefs of this target audience do you need to build, change or reinforce to reach your goal?
9. When you build strong relationships with your management team before you launch, it makes it easier to execute on your vision.
10. Execution is more important than the idea.

Full Story on entrepreneur.com.

Executive Reshuffle at Apple: Scott Forstall is out

Tim Cook take his first major step of reshaping the top executive ranks at Apple. It appears that a battle was brewing within Apple for some time about key design philosophies. Scott Forstall, who apparently has been branded as not being a team players, stumbled of the debacle with the Apple maps.

Read the detailed stories in LA Times and NY Times

Citi Chairman Is Said to Have Planned Chief’s Exit Over Months

Citibank’s CEO Viram Pandit was removed through a boardroom coup. There are two questions that the episode raises. Was Pandit truly oblivious to the what the chairman Michael E. O’Neill was up to? Did O’Neill in the end do CITI a favor or has done long-term damage to the morale of the high-level employees.  The NY Times reports:

Vikram Pandit’s last day at Citigroup swung from celebratory to devastating in a matter of minutes. Having fielded congratulatory e-mails about the earnings report in the morning that suggested the bank was finally on more solid ground, Mr. Pandit strode into the office of the chairman at day’s end on Oct. 15 for what he considered just another of their frequent meetings on his calendar.
Michael O’Neill is said to have begun building a case to force out Mr. Pandit after Mr. O’Neill became chairman in April.
Instead, Mr. Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup, was told three news releases were ready. One stated that Mr. Pandit had resigned, effective immediately. Another that he would resign, effective at the end of the year. The third release stated Mr. Pandit had been fired without cause. The choice was his. The abrupt encounter, described by three people briefed on the conversation, included a terse comment by the chairman, Michael E. O’Neill: “The board has lost confidence in you.”

Read full story on NY Times.

Newsweek stops print edition after 80 years

You may not have heard it. Magazines, unlike newspapers, are continuing to do well in the age of the internet. But this is apparently not true for News Weeklies in the USA. Newsweek today announced that it will stop its print edition and focus on an electronic edition. The LA Times provides the details.  Read Story.

Microsoft Rumored to Become more like Apple in major Strategy Shift

Microsoft is rumored to imitate Apple’s strategy of making both software and hardware.

Microsoft (MSFT) is currently in the midst of a major transition unlike anything the company has dealt with in the past. According to our own sources and multiple subsequent reports, Microsoft is working on its own smartphone. While this would mark the first time Microsoft has launched a self-branded smartphone (we’re not counting the KIN), the implications for the company are much greater than just a phone. Noted industry insider Eldar Murtazin has written a lengthy piece on the company’s upcoming Windows Phone plans, but has also explored some of the reasons why Microsoft is being forced to make its own tablets and smartphones, and most likely its own laptops and desktops as well in the near future.

Source: Yahoo News

Summary of GE Type Workout

One Year after his death: Apple Remembers Steve Job

Steve Jobs best moments introducing new products

T-Mobile buys and merges with Metro PCS: Will it succeed?

After the government did not allow ATT to buy T-Mobile, T-Mobile needed to find a different way to achieve scale and cut costs. Today it announced buying and merging with Metro PCS. Will the firm be able to avoid the fiasco of the Sprint/Nextel merger?

T-Mobile and MetroPCS will continue to operate as separate brands. Throughout the morning, T-Mobile executives sought to allay one of the biggest concerns about the merger, the incompatibility of the company’s network with MetroPCS’ own. John Legere, who will become the chief executive of the combined network operator, argued that the company will slowly move MetroPCS’ customers to its own GSM standard — with the goal of moving the unified entity to the Long Term Evolution technology down the road. The aim was to avoid comparisons to Sprint’s merger with Nextel, which failed at the same task and left that merged company in a far weaker position. 

Full Stor