The Conglomerate Discount in USA is 9%

Breaking up big companies is back in vogue. In Australia, the Fosters group is spinning out its Wine business because the expectation is that the parts individually are worth more than valuation of whole company. Read the full story in on Economist.com and why emerging markets don’t have this conglomerate discount.

Great Animation: The Credid Crisis Explained in Simple Terms (11 Minutes)

Nokia Announces its Turnaround strategy:  Ally with Microsoft for High-end Smartphones

You can read the full story behind this graph on Economist.com/

Global Health and Wealth over the past 200 years

Review of DuPont?s Dyes Business: Three Decades of Innovation, 1950-1980

Joseph Innarone and John Tackray are two former members of the DuPont dye business that experienced its golden age after World War II and was sold off in 1979, marking the visible onset of the decline of the U.S. synthetic dye industry. The authors are not research chemists. For the entire period covered by the book, they both held different jobs in the dye business, spanning technical service, sales, and business management. In course of their various assignments that started for both of them as trainees in the Technical Laboratory, the authors acquired substantial knowledge of dye innovations and the business of selling dyes. Rather than attempting a scholarly history (only five sources are cited), the authors offer their own personal history of Du Pont’s dye business. Their story is valuable for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding how DuPont became an innovator in the synthetic dye industry yet in the 1970s could no longer compete successfully with foreign rivals. Du Pont exited the industry in 1979 as later did all other U.S. headquartered firms.  Download full Review in AMBIX, Vol. 57 No. 3, November, 2010.

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All you ever wanted to know about macroeconomics in seven minutes

Does Microsoft have Game Changing Device with Kinect

From NY Times:

Microsoft has long salivated over the notion of controlling the living room and becoming a major entertainment force. Kinect may well stand as its best bet yet for turning that vision into a reality. “This is an incredibly amazing, wonderful first step toward making interactivity in the living room available to everybody,” says Mr. Ballmer, while cautioning that Microsoft still has “a lot of work to do.”

The first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft $30,000 to build, but 1,000 workers would eventually be involved in the project. And now, hundreds of millions of dollars later, the company has a product it can sell for $150 a pop and still turn a profit, Mr. Mattrick says. (People who don’t have an Xbox can pay $300 for a package that includes the console, Kinect and a game.)

For Mr. Ballmer, Kinect is far more than a business opportunity or a pleasant diversion for consumers. It offers a moment to prove to investors and company directors that Microsoft is capable of an Applesque, game-changing moment under his leadership.

Read Full Story

Siemens Tightens up it Corporate Strategy

The Economist published a great story on how Siemens, battered by bribery scandal, recruited an outsider CEO and now has started to leverage the potential benefits of owning several business that could be run as stand-alone companies, operating at large scale all across the world, and avoiding to over-engineer products. The story illustrates most of the key ideas of SM3, including how to implement a corporate strategy. 

Read: A Giant Awakens
Europe’s biggest engineering firm used to be known for two things: making everything but a profit; and scandal. Now things look very different

CEO Q&A: Skander Malcolm

What is your number one tip for managing people?

People do things for their reasons, not yours. Listen. Connect. Inspire (stretch).

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

It’s hard to decide between my first boss’s advice, “You are less than half as smart as you think you are”, which set me on the right track and my father’s advice, “There is a big difference between what you think you are good at and what you are good at, which has always reminded me to understand my strengths and play to them.

From BRW, September 16- 22, 2010, p. 10.

Why Starbuck’s Failed in Australia

When Starbucks entered the Australian market in 2000, it was one of the biggest coffee chains globally, opening one new store every day somewhere in the world, notes Patterson. Its success in the US, which had not previously enjoyed a strong coffee-drinking culture, had given the brand great confidence to enter other markets including Japan (1996) and China (1998). The company now has more than 15,000 stores in 44 territories. But in mid 2008, Starbucks’ management announced that it would close 61 of its 84 Australian stores. The closures took place swiftly – within one month. Losses were enormous, including 685 jobs and A$143 million. Just 23 Australian stores were left operating in prime locations. What went so wrong?

Read the full analysis by Profeessors Paul Patternson and Marc Uncles in Knowledge @ The Australian School of Business.

Short Introduction to the Strategic Management Year of the AGSM MBA (Executive) by Peter Murmann

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 2 by Rose Trevelyan

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 3 by Shayne Gary

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 4 by Peter Murmann

James Yuille Strategies for Networking

Don’t front up at a neworking function expecting to make a sale. “Networking is an opportunity to meet people in a neutral environment, to form relationship and to built trust. People who are too anxious about making a dollar will only ostracise themselves from the rest of the group.” Other tips include: be open-minded, don’t be pushy, be a good listener and think to long-term. [...] “I have known someone [though networking] for 12 year and only last year did that relationship come up with business.”

From: BRW, September 2—8, 2010, p. 38

Peter Murmann: These tips can be applied not only to win business but also to advance one’s career.

Lehman Brothers’ did not Walk to Talk of its Mission Statement

BRW reports:  “Lehman Brothers’ mission statement nodded in all the right directions. It told employees and investors that

We are one firm, defined by our unwavering commitment to our clients, our shareholders, and each other. Our mission is to build unrivalled partnerships with, and value for, our clients, through knowledge, creativity, and dedication of our people, leading to superior returns to our shareholders.

However, the investment bank did exactly the opposite, gorging on low-quality mortgages and nearly felling the global financial system. Rather than ‘set and forget’,  [mission statements] should be part of a conversation between staff and management.”

(BRW August 26-October 6, 2010, p. 78)

New Management Focus: Invest in Relationships!

Designing an organization requires making a million decisions both large (e.g. picking a strategy) and small (e.g. picking out paper for the PC printer). It is easy to get lost in the trivial instead of focusing on getting the critical elements right. In my courses, I try to present ideas and frameworks that help identify what is important. At the recent Academy of Management Conference in Montreal I came across a phrase that was new to me. In my view,  it crystallizes what managers need to do to design an organization that is able to respond to all the unexpected events that invariably occur in the life of an organization:

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You Don’t Have to Pay Employees More Than the Competition to Keep Them Happy

Returning to Chicago for the first time in three years, I went to two of my favorite restaurants. In one, Lulu’s, most of the waitresses and busboys I had seen three years ago were still there. In the other, I recognized no one except for the owner. So I asked the owner of Lulu’s if he was paying his people more.  He said: “No.” I asked him a second time. He still said:  “No.” Confirming the lesson that many management professors emphasize in the context of the Southwest airline example, you don’t have to pay people more than the competition to keep them happy. Lulu’s is a fun place and the interior design is attractive, providing employees non-monetary rewards. Evidently the owner is also not getting on the nerves of his staff.  Jokingly he says in front of one of his female employees: “I cannot even get rid of the people I would like to see go.” The lady—who must have been working there for at least 8 years—interjects: “I knew you were going to say this.” The general lesson (except perhaps for Wall Street before the crash) is: You don’t need to pay people more than the competition. But the total rewards of working for you have to be more than the total rewards of working for someone else. Otherwise people will leave.

Constructing Relational Databases to Study Life Histories on Your PC or Mac

In this article, I present a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the rawdata. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances between two events marking the life histories of chemists. Download Article.

The Wrong Stuff Blog

We seem to have a built-in tendency to want to learn from successful people and pay little attention to failures. We also have a hard time admitting mistakes. In fact, what dintinguihses mature and, dare I say, clever,  indivdiuals is precisely that they can admit mistakes and learn from them.  Kathryn Schulz, who is about to publish a book on the subject, has published on Slate a number of great interviews and reflections on being wrong. The one with Alan Dershowitz is particularly interesting. If you want to start with the most recent entry, start here: The Wrong Stuff

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:

After nearly 17 years of consistent growth, Barnes & Noble is stumbling. Revenue fell 3% to $5.12 billion for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2009, while earnings dropped about 45% to $76 million.

When it launched the iPad last month, Apple championed a new approach to e-book pricing. Earlier this year, most large publishers agreed to establish a so-called agency model, where the publisher receives 70% of the digital price while e-book sellers act as agents and receive 30%. While some best sellers remain at $9.99, many major authors are priced at $12.99 or $14.99.

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Google’s New Search Homepage: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Data as well as Intuitions

CEO Q&A: Greg Bourke

What is your number one tip for managing people?

Be empathetic: When you understand the issues that constrain staff from doing their job you will usually identify bigger issues in the organization.

Is there a lesson you have never forogotten?

Progress is not perfection.

From BRW, April 29-June 2, 2010, p. 12.

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.

CEO Q&A: Lincoln Crawely

What has been your greatest regret in Business?

That I didn’t really get to know and accept my strengths and weaknesses earlier.

What is your number one tip for managing people?

Fairness and balance, which must not be confused with compromise.

From BRW, April 15-21, 2010, p. 10.