2010 05
Dramatic Challenge to Barnes & Nobles Business Model
This one of the most vivid examples of challenges to the existing business model of a firm. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Google’s New Search Homepage: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Data as well as Intuitions
Jump to minute 1:47 of the Business Week video.
Excellent Overview of the Philosophy of Social Sciences
Daniel Little’s article for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an excellent overview of the key issues in the philosophy of social sciences. You can read it here.
Steven Strogatz explains beautifully how the concept of inifinity first tripped up philosophers but then provided them with a powerful tool to calculate things that could not be calculated without taking things to inifity. I wish I had had as good a math teacher as Strogatz. The lesson here is also that Strogatz does not provide a solution to Zeno’s paradox but that he shows that even without fully removing the puzzles around infinity one can use the concept to get more knowledge in other areas.
Read his column Take It to the Limit.
2010 03
Apple with only 7% of Sales account today for 35% of Industry Profits
According to a Business Insider article, the banking giant has aggregated numbers from the top ten PC makers in the world and determined that, while Apple only commands 7 percent of overall revenues in the PC market, its products account for 35 percent of the operating profits. See Full Article.
2010 02
For all information and resources regarding the course, UNSW students should log into the Blackboard Course Website.
Couse Outline for Intellectual Foundation of Social Sciences now available
Here you can find the course outline. STRE 8005 More information for enrolled students is available at the UNSW course webpage.
2010 01
Richard Branson’s Fundamental Objective
The Financial Times posed twenty questions to Richard Branson. Here are the two important ones that touch upon the idea of a fundamental objective.
How important is money?
My priority is learning and trying to improve the world – not being rich.How do you want to be remembered?
That I have made a difference.
Read full interview.
2009 04
Rarely is a Hollywood movie such a great teaching instrument. Duplicity gives a wonderful picture of how far large companies go in figuring out what their competition is up to. What’s more, the principles of game theory are very well illustrated by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, who make a wonderful pair. I recommend that every Strategic Management student watch this film.
2009 02
2009 01
Rolls-Royce: Transforming its Jet-Engine Business Model
The Economist reports how Rolls-Royse figured out a different way to make money in the jet engine business:
The big pay-off from getting engines under more wings comes from selling spares and servicing them. This is because selling aircraft engines is like selling razors. The razor and engine make little if any profit; that comes later, from blades or spare parts and servicing (see chart 3). Gross margins from rebuilding engines are thought to be about 35%; analysts at Credit Suisse, an investment bank, estimate that some makers of jet engines get about seven times as much revenue from servicing and selling spare parts as they do from selling engines. Many analysts suspect that Rolls-Royce (and others) sell engines at a loss. Judging this is hard, though, because of the way Rolls-Royce accounts for long-term contracts, often by booking a profit on the sale for income that will be received only over many years. Rolls-Royce says that, on average, engines are sold at a profit. The trouble with selling razors at a loss is that someone else may make the blades to fit them. And the juicy margins in engine maintenance have indeed attracted a swarm of independent servicing firms (and engine-makers after each other’s business).
What the Financial Crisis Taught us about Human Decision Making
David Brooks writes in the NY Times:
Once there was just Newtonian physics and the world seemed neat and mechanical. Then quantum physics came along and revealed that deep down things are much weirder than they seem. Something similar is now happening with public policy.Once, classical economics dominated policy thinking. The classical models presumed a certain sort of orderly human makeup. Inside each person, reason rides the passions the way a rider sits atop a horse. Sometimes people do stupid things, but generally the rider makes deliberative decisions, and the market rewards rational behavior. Markets tend toward efficiency. People respond in pretty straightforward ways to incentives. The invisible hand forms a spontaneous, dynamic order. Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models. This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis — how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once. The crisis has delivered a blow to classical economics and taken a body of psychological work that was at the edge of public policy thought and brought it front and center. In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant.
2008 11
BP does not try to run its rural service stations in Australia
Excerpt from BRW: For an expanding independent petroleum retailer, customer relationships are everything.
Biq organisations are usually considered to be more efficient than smaller enes - but rarely more customer-friendly. Case in point, big banks. sharehelders love their taut back offices and fat profits; customers hate their skinny front lines and rate them well below small credit unions and building societies in satisfaction surveys.
It is a business theory that influences how oil companies distribute fuels in Australia. In cities, drivers have choices and can seek out the service station offering the cheapest petrol. In the country, the distance between service stations is qreater and what people expect from them - mechanical repairs and farm deliveries as well as fuel - is more varied.
Accordingly, the local arms of some of the world’s biqgest companies run city statiens themselves but use independent operators elsewhere. “I don’t think we have the ability to understand and build the sort of relationship with customers that is really important in rural Australia,” ‘BP Australia’s vice-president of wholesale reseller and retail, ‘Dean Salter, says. However, ene of Salter’s independent operators, led by a predecessor in his position, is trying to prove that big orqanisations can be intimate as well as efficient.
2008 09
Scorecard: Wesfarmers after Coles Acquisition
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wesfarmers showed how a corporation could be successful with a similar strategy as GE in America: buying and selling unrelated businesses. But then private capital entered the acquisition market, bidding up the price for Australian corporations that were up for sales. Wesfarmers found it more difficult to pursue it disciplined strategy of finding acquisitions that you be managed more effectively and unlock shareholder value. Almost two years ago Wesfarmers but the underperforming Coles supermarket chain. Plenty of commentators were worried that Wefarmers, breaking its traditions, overpaid for Coles and would never be able to improve the performance of Coles as the Perth-based conglomerate had done with earlier acquisitions such as Bunnings.
2008 08
Alcaltel & Lucent: The French American Merger does not realize the promised benefits
WHEN Alcatel, a French maker of telecoms equipment, announced its plan in 2006 to merge with Lucent, an American rival, reactions were mixed. There was general agreement that bigger was better and that the combined firm would benefit from greater geographical reach. But there was also scepticism that its French and American managers would be able to get along. With good reason, it seems: on July 29th Alcatel-Lucent announced its sixth consecutive quarterly loss and the resignations of Serge Tchuruk, its French chairman, and Patricia Russo, its American chief executive. Their firm’s troubles stem in large part from its internal clash of cultures. Read more on Economist.com
2008 05
Adrian Finlayson on the Difference of Being a Consultant and Being a CEO
“It’s much harder doing than telling. Things take a lot longer than you initially think, and along the way you have to manage a broad stakeholder base, including your team, investors and the board. A chief executive is a management consultant who has to implement his own recommendations.”
Dell Needs to Change its Business Model
In SMI we are doing a case study of how Dell developed a market positioning and orgnanizational strategy that allowed it to outcompete all other firms in the PC industry. Dell seemed unstoppable and. The Economist reports on the current troubles of Dell and how the returned founder of the firm tries to turn the firm around and restore it to glory, i.e. growth and profitability. Read Story
September 5, 2008 update: Dell plans to sell all its factories
LaudaMotion’s New Business Model for Car Rentals: 1 Euro a day if drive at least 30 kilometers
Laudamotion is gambling that it can charge advertisers rather than rental customers for the cost of renting out small car in a city. If you drive more than 30 kilometers a day in a metropolitan area, you only pay 1 euro. The service is presently available in some major German and Austrian cities. Will LaudaMotion’s novel rental car business model work?
2008 04
Danger Looming in Different Market Segment: The iPhone Challenge for Blackberry
Blackberry’s dominate the business PDA email market. But Apple’s iPhone initially designed for consumers may invade the business market as well.
Henry Kravis On Creating Value
Henry Kravis: The thing that is really important as you think about the private equity industry is that it has changed dramatically. In the late nineties we made a lot of mistakes at KKR. I’m not saying it’s good that we made the mistakes, but we did learn from our mistakes, because we changed the way we do business. The first thing we did was to make sure we acted and thought like industrialists. The days of just financial engineering are over. You have to really operate the business. Our whole approach at KKR since 1999 is that our job begins the day we buy a company. I like to say any fool can buy a company. There’s plenty of financing around. But what do you do with a business to create value? We’ve had an in-house consulting firm since the early eighties, but today we have a very large one. These operating consultants put metrics into every business that we’re involved with, they improve productivity, they shorten the supply chain, they improve sales. We expect everyone at KKR to understand their industry from the bottom up, and talk to purchasing managers, marketing people, salespeople, customers, suppliers, and understand the metrics, understand the best practices, the economic drivers, what drives an industry.
Has the Macquarie Group found a way to achieve higher returns without increasing risk?
Read the story on Economist.com
Ford has tried to regain a competitive position a number of times without success. Will the company succeed this time as its struggles for survial. Read article on WSJ.com.
April 24, 2008: In Surprise, Ford Swings to Profit in First Quarter
Falling margins in Flat Panel TVs force Philips out of North American Producer Market
As prices decline, profits have been increasingly difficult to achieve. According to iSuppli, the average selling price for a 42-inch L.C.D. television has fallen from $2,082 one year ago to $1,544 today, a 26 percent drop. Depending on the manufacturer, the profit margin for that size set is between 9 and 16 percent.
2007 07
How to get around the difficulty of estimating returns from innovation
Bombardier Recreational Products, based in Quebec, has spent C$225m ($195m) over 11 years developing the Can-Am Spyder Roadster, a three-wheeled motor vehicle. When it goes on sale later this year the $15,000 Spyder will be aimed at baby-boomers who like the idea of riding al fresco but do not feel comfortable on a two-wheeler, says Jose Boisjoli, BRP’s boss. Mr Boisjoli admits that his firm has no idea how much demand there will be for the Spyder. One way to think about how much you should spend on innovation is to ask: how much money can I lose with a failed innovation without jeopardizing the existence of the firm.
Wesfarmers: Interview with Former CEO Michael Chaney
In the spirit of “Where are the Now”, here is an interview with the outgoing CEO of Wesfarmers, Michael Chaney, before he became chairman of the National Australian Bank (NAB).