Category: Management

[via Reuben]Business Week writes:

[A] new breed of high-tech companies is defying conventional wisdom about how corporations ought to operate. While most large companies have extensive worldwide operations, these companies go much further — aiming to transcend nationality altogether. C.K. Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, calls this the fourth stage of globalization. In the first stage, companies operate in one country and sell into others. Second-stage multinationals set up foreign subsidiaries to handle one country’s sales. And the third stage involves operating an entire line of business in another country.

What’s different about these outfits — call them transnationals — is that even the executive suite is virtual. They place their top executives and core corporate functions in different countries to gain a competitive edge through the availability of talent or capital, low costs, or proximity to their most important customers.

An example: Trend Micro, whose “financial headquarters is in Tokyo, where it went public; product development is in PhD-rich Taiwan; and sales is in Silicon Valley — inside the giant American market.” India’s Wipro is also mentioned in the article.

Phil Wolff points to Nanomix as an example of how a picture can make a big difference in explaining what a business does:

This 7k image is chock-full of information. It explains:

– How products emerge.
– The core activities and deliverables (and organizations? and talent mix?)
– The rate of weeding out needed along the way.
– That the process stops at creating the new product. They don’t bring new things to market. Suggesting marketing partners or customers.
– Key opportunities for productivity improvement (earlier in the cycle)
– A basis for competitive comparison (how many ideas do you generate, how many designs can you model, what is your cost at each step)
– That computational design comes before lab work, different from how research was done only ten years’ ago.
– The 1000-to-1 ratio is clearly hypothetical. But can’t you see a quarterly report with real numbers and the funnels sized in proportion to the real levels of activity?

What’s your business? Do you have a simple diagram that reveals your business at a high level?

We need to do something similar for Emergic and RISC.

I recently read Bhaskar Chakravorti’s book “The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World.” There is an interview with him in Ubiquity [link via Viswanath Gondi]. A few quotes:

Fast change is any new idea, technology, innovation or product that makes a fundamental difference in our social, political or commercial lives. My argument is that the process by which technology has an impact is actually quite slow even if the intrinsic benefit of the innovation is enormous. It’s a point that seems to have been lost on many people in the last few years.

If you have a problem you must understand who the relevant actors are in that problem, what is the nature of the status quo, and what are the choices that explain the current gridlock. One actor may be doing things that constrain anybody else from adopting an innovation.

The current status quo is in a gridlock equilibrium because all the players are interconnected with each other. They are part of a network and they cannot act alone.

In order to get from here to there, you break down the problem into the choices of individual players: what their current choices are and what you want those choices to be. You also have to think about what is driving those choices. You create a map of potential barriers or motivating factors for specific players that you as a strategist might be able to influence.

An interesting aspect of the interview is Bhaskar’s comments about the network computer (or the thin client):

I don’t think that a network computer in its pure form, as articulated by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison several years back, will happen. However, many aspects of that original idea are already happening. It’s the classic example of fast change in innovation taking a long time. When the innovation appears, it does so in a form that is embodied in a completely different incarnation.

At the time when Ellison was talking about the network computer, people were getting interested in something totally different. It was a little device called a Palm Pilot, which took off like a rocket. The Palm Pilot had very few applications but some aspects of it had the same value proposition as the network computer. It was a so-called “thin client,” as it didn’t have a whole lot of intelligence sitting on it. However, if you stuck it into a pocket, it could synchronize with a central server, which was the user’s personal computer, and you could match up the data on your Palm Pilot with the stuff on the PC and vice versa. You could use it for a limited number of purposes and then come back and dock it into the server. That’s not very different from a much broader set of applications that the NC was designed around.

On the related concept of grid computing, he says: “That vision is not very different from a notion of network computing where the intelligence is somewhere in a server inside the enterprise. However, the ultimate penetration of a utility computing concept will also have to reckon with an inter-connected network of participants and a coordination of their choices. This is similar to the challenges that the network computer had to confront.”

Ninad Mehta points to an article by Michael Perla on applying Sun Tzu’s ideas to marketing, discussing four areas: speed, strengths and weaknesses, alliances, and successful market capture. Sun Tzu’s comment which applies equally to marketing: “The best military strategy, then, is to use superior positioning. After that, use diplomacy. After that, use military force as a threat. Only after all else has failed, attack your enemy.”

Inc writes about Stefan Thomke’s new book. “there is a vast store of potential innovation in new technologies. To help companies unlock that potential, he writes that they must tap the power of experimentation and new technologies while changing their processes, organization and management of innovation. He explains that computer modeling and simulation have made experimentation less expensive than ever before, and research and development (R&D) teams now have tools at their disposal that can be used to create new value for customers.” The book suggests six principles for managing experimentation and explaining how they can be used to drive innovative product development:

1. Anticipate and exploit early information through “front-loaded” innovation processes.

2. Experiment frequently but do not overload your organization.

3. Integrate new and traditional technologies to unlock performance.

4. Organize for rapid experimentation.

5. Fail early and often but avoid “mistakes.”

6. Manage projects as experiments.

Personally, experimentation is the way I have seen one can make progress with ideas. Try out a few things, and some will work, others don’t. It is how many of the things that we are doing today have emerged. More bottom-up than through a top-down approach.

This is a 3-year-old post by Joel Spolsky, but one worth reading and implementing because “interviewing is more of an art than a science”:

Here’s a typical plan for interviewing a programmer:

1. Introduction
2. Question about recent project candidate worked on
3. Impossible Question
4. C Function
5. Are you satisfied?
6. Design Question
7. The Challenge
8. Do you have any questions?

In a nutshell, hire people who are “Smart, and Gets Things Done.”

Fast Company has this list of questions to ask colleagues (or ourselves) from a book, “Fierce Conversations”, by Susan Scott:

What has become clear since last we met?

What is the area that, if you made an improvement, would give you and others the greatest return on time, energy, and dollars invested?

What is currently impossible to do that, if it were possible, would change everything?

What are you trying to make happen in the next three months?

What’s the most important decision you’re facing? What’s keeping you from making it?

What topic are you hoping I won’t bring up?

What area under your responsibility are you most satisfied with? Least satisfied with?

What part of your responsibilities are you avoiding right now?

Who are your strongest employees? What are you doing to ensure that they’re happy and motivated?

Who are your weakest employees? What is your plan for them?

Susan is right – these are the type of questions we certainly need to answer, but do not. Time to do some introspection…

Baseline takes a somewhat critical look at Warren Buffet’s management style (not often one sees that happening): “Shareholders nearly deify Warren Buffett and now he’s an advisor for Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that doesn’t mean other companies can or should follow the way the avuncular champion of business ethics conducts his own affairs.”

Inc writes on an activity we do all the time, providing insights into various books on the topic along the way:

Like most every other source of negotiation advice, Getting to Yes begins by saying that however much you think negotiation is part of your life, you’re underestimating. “Everyone negotiates something every day,” according to the introduction. “All of us negotiate many times a day,” G. Richard Shell ups the ante in the opening to Bargaining for Advantage.

Bargaining for Advantage , the book by Wharton professor G. Richard Shell, often backs its arguments with tidbits drawn from psychological research. For example, the “consistency principle” refers to people’s need to appear reasonable. You can take advantage of this by “skillful use of standards” to make other people feel they need to use your standards to feel reasonable. And the more authoritative your standards seem, the better. You Can Negotiate Anything , probably the most entertaining of the books, skips any allusion to scholarship about the human tendency to defer to authority, instead citing an old Candid Camera episode in which a surprising number of highway drivers confronted with the sign “Delaware Closed” actually turned around. And, of course, you want to give special attention to sussing out what your opponent really wants.

News.com says that Dell is the most influential PC company in the world:

No other company has done more to change the landscape of the hardware industry.

The real reason for Dell’s success is that the company follows a fundamental axiom: Don’t do anything stupid. It sounds like an easy motto to adopt, but few of us, in business or in private life, actually heed it.

Another simple rule Dell lives by: Nothing excites people like free stuff. So the company often includes extra memory or free handhelds with consumer PCs.

Continue reading Dell’s Influence