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.

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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.

Read Full Interview at Columbia Business School .

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.

Full Story at NY Times

Coming Soon Superfast Internet

by Jonathan Leake, Science Editor, Times of London
THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

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Book Review Instructions

During the SMY, each student will present a review of a book or an article that has extended their thinking about Strategic Management. The article or book should not be a core management text that most students would be already familiar with. New insights often come from another domain. For this reason we encourage you to look far afield for texts that provide you with some insight into the problems of the general manager or entrepreneur. For example, “It’s Only a Game” by John O’Neill (former CEO of the Australian Rugby Union and Football Federation of Australia) is a good insight into managing a complex organisation. We have posted an example of such a book review on the eLearning website along with some background information on the value of this assignment.

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Conglomerate Watch: Immelt find it tough to follow Jack Welsh’s act

GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt finds it difficult to convince markets that his new strategy will deliver value as his predecessor did.
Two articles in the Financial Times highlight how important it is for CEO to communicate effectively to financial analysts whose recommendation drive the stock price of a firm. Here are excerpts from the informative articles.

GE redoubles efforts to woo investors.

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Understanding the Strategies of Airbus and Boeing

Boeing and Airbus are pursuing different strategies with their next generations planes (the superlarge A380 and the supereffecient Boeing 787 Dreamliner). A recent article in the New York Times nicely demonstrates that the differences on the two companies’ strategic bet are driven by two different views how passenger travel will develop in the future. In essence, the firms tried to create strategies that fit with the perceived future environments of airplane travel.

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Strategic Management 1

Course Outline

Assessments

eLearning

Update on Case Studies

Topics

Links