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 private 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

Meg Whitman is trying to turn HP around

HP has been falling behind Apple and Google and the race to be the leading Silicon Valley company. Now Meg Whitman is trying to turn this former star company around. The NYT reports.

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.
TWENTYyears ago, people like Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, Larry Ellison at Oracle, and John Chambers at Cisco Systems heard Kenneth Olsen, then the leader of Digital Equipment Corporation, deride the PC as unsuited for business. Within a few years, DEC had been gobbled up by Compaq Computer. Everyone knows viscerally how fast change can overtake a legacy business — and how hard it is to change.
There’s little glory in managing decline, particularly in an industry in love with what’s next. Apple’s tablets are taking share from PC makers like H.P., but only after Apple had a near-death corporate experience that ended with the return of Steve Jobs. He created a new reality for Apple with its retail stores, something that H.P. can’t copy to sell PCs. I.B.M. also transitioned successfully after billions in losses and years of cuts. Most others ended like DEC.

Full Story

Why Apple wanted to wave its own Maps Application and dumped Google’s prematurely

Yesterday the Apple CEO apologized for Apple’s crummy maps application in iOS 6. The WSJ reports on the financial reason why Apple wanted to dump Google maps.

Maps are a big piece of the Apple-Google rivalry. Opus Research has estimated that mobile ads associated with maps or locations account for about 25% of the roughly $2.5 billion spent on ads in mobile devices in 2012. Google has had mapping software since 2005, and a Google Maps app was pre-installed on the first iPhone starting in 2007. Apple only began building its maps software in 2009 under Mr. Jobs, with an eye toward making its version the default mapping app on the iPhone and, later, the iPad. Apple acquired several companies to construct its mapping technology, as well as using information from third parties, such as navigation system maker Tom Tom NV, before it was ready to boot Google Maps.

Source: WSJ.com

Home Depot changes its strategy in China after failing to achieve its targets

Home Depot is not the first company to find out that the strategy that worked well back home does not work in a foreign country. Wal-Mart failed in Germany not realizing that the competitive landscape was different. Starbucks failed in Australia, closing most of its shops because the Australian consumer was used to much sophisticated coffee. The WSJ journal reports on the changes in the Home Depot China strategy after failing to implement the previous one successfully.

Home Depot Learns Chinese Prefer ‘Do-It-for-Me’
The largest U.S. home-improvement retailer, which entered China in 2006, has struggled to gain traction in a country where cheap labor has stunted the do-it-yourself ethos and apartment-based living leaves scarce demand for products like lumber.
Home Depot conceded that it misread the country’s appetite for do-it-yourself products. “The market trend says this is more of a do-it-for-me culture,” a Home Depot spokeswoman said of China.Home Depot is shaking up its strategy by focusing on specialty stores. Three months ago, it opened one paint-and-flooring store and one home-decorations outlet in the northern port city of Tianjin to cater to specific needs and shopping preferences shown by Chinese consumers, the spokeswoman said. It also plans to launch online operations with a Chinese partner, she said, without naming the company.

Home Depot debuted in China with a 12-store acquisition six years ago and the number has since dwindled as it found that Chinese consumers differ from their global counterparts. As Swedish furniture giant IKEA discovered, Chinese consumers will pay for people to do the work for them. Several years ago, the furniture store added services to help customers assemble their furniture.

Home Depot’s closures will cause the company to take a $160 million after-tax charge in the third quarter, a company statement said. The charge will be equal to about 10 cents per diluted share, and will include the impairment of goodwill and other assets, lease terminations, severance and other charges associated with closing the stores.

Full Story

Deutsche Bank lowers ROE target from 25% to 12%

When a company has a very high financial targets, employees are encouraged to do everything possible to achieve it, which in turn may lead to an unwanted increase in the level of risk that the firm faces. As the FT.com reports, the new leadership of the Deutsche Bank determined that the target was to high. They may have felt that they needed to curb the risk taking in the bank.

Deutsche’s new co-chief executives are expected to make a decisive break with the decade-long era of Josef Ackermann, their predecessor, when they will drop a target of generating a 25 per cent pre-tax return on equity. At a strategy presentation in Frankfurt after 100 days in charge of the bank, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen are set to announce a “substantially lower return on equity target”, one person close to the situation said.High quality global journalism requires investment. They are also expected to unveil a strategy for much closer integration of the bank’s business lines, make significant changes to the bank’s bonus model and give more details on a plan to take out €3bn of costs.Analysts estimate that the new goal could be in the region of 12 to 13 per cent ROE after tax – a benchmark more commonly looked at by investors than the pre-tax figure.

Full Story on ft.com