Readings

Extra, Extra,.........

( 1 ) The Chief Learning Officer May 2005

( 2 ) Hyundai the new Toyota Detroit News Auto or pdf online

From Harvard Business Review (available free from their site)

( 3 )“What Makes an Effective Executive,” by Peter Drucker.

From The Summary in Brief (available free from their site)

( 4 ) Who Says Elephants Can't Dance today! (8 Pages )
When Lou Gerstner took the helm of IBM as its CEO in 1993, the company was a shambles — hemorrhaging money, drained by an insular corporate culture, and rapidly falling prey to smaller companies that could make the same products better, faster and for less money. Wall Street was calling for its breakup into small, independent business units, but Gerstner had other things in mind — to keep the company together, change the way it (and, eventually, its entire industry) did business, and show it could keep up with and even surpass the startups and small businesses presenting its biggest challenges. Lou Gerstner thought the enormous corporate elephant could dance as gracefully as its much smaller competition. He was right.


(please note that due to limitation in storage pdf files will be taken from line after June 2005, and replaced by another subjects. Any file can be e mailed by request free of charge. Please contact
shaw4545@yahoo.com

From Stanford Audio & Video

( 5 ) Create Candor in the Workplace, Says Jack WelchThere is a remarkable lack of candor in the workplace today, says Jack Welch, the man who led General Electric for some 20 years, and it's slowing down corporate progress. "Encourage candor," he advised a Business School audience. "If you reward candor, you'll get it." (April 2005) [Details] Video File, 1:03 hour

From Business Week on line

( 6 ) Beyond Blue Never mind computers and tech services. IBM's radical new focus is on revamping customers' operations -- and even running them


( 7 ) Can Anyone Save HP? Despite the board's insistence that it will stay the Carly course, a breakup may be the only way to turn the company around.

( 8 ) Outsourcing Innovation Big-name companies such as Dell, Motorola, and Philips are farming out their R&D to giant but little-known Asian developers. It's fast, efficient, and yes, it's cheaper. But the economic implications are enormous. Are these companies going too far?

Please see my other Blogs

Strategy

Management

Marketing

New technological advances and new market forces are creating a new economy. Companies and marketers need to add new tools and practices if they hope to be successful.
Four specific drivers of the new economy are digitalization and connectivity, disintermediation and reintermediation, customization and customerization, and industry convergence. Digitalization in particular has introduced exciting new capabilities for consumers and for businesses.
The new economy is shifting several old economy business practices toward organizing by customer segments ( instead of only by products ), focusing on customer lifetime value ( instead of only transactions ), focusing on stakeholders ( and not only shareholders ),getting everyone to do the marketing, building brands through behavior ( not just advertising ), focusing on customer retention ( as much as customer acquisition ), measuring customer satisfaction, and underpromising and overdelivering.
Companies face many questions in adopting e-marketing. Three of them are knowing how to design an attractive web site, knowing how to advertise on the web, and knowing how to build a sound revenue and profit model for their dot-com business.
Companies are also becoming skilled in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which focuses on meeting the individual needs of valued customers. The skill requires building a customer database and doing datamining to detect trends, segments, and individual needs.More...

Business Wargames

It is unlikely in the foreseeable future that the world will return to a period of sustained non-inflationary growth, and companies must therefore face the fact that survival and growth is now largely dependent on taking markets away from competitors, protecting business from competitive aggression, and deterring an assault on their markets. Business has always been competitive, but now more than ever companies require strategies which truly reflect the combative nature of the market-place. The closest analogy to current market conditions is war. Despite differences in degree and in kind between business and military conflict, there are remarkable similarities between the two sets of precepts. Companies and armies share common strategic manoeuvres in terms of deterrence, offence, defence and alliance. They are similar in the way in which they are organized and structured. They use equivalent systems and procedures and rely on the same functions - intelligence, weaponry, logistics and communications - to provide a combat edge. The resemblance between the two forms of conflict is not surprising since both companies and armies are organizationally designed for one purpose - to fight, whether in the market or on the battlefield. More...

The Concept Of Strategy

Competition existed long before strategy. Competition began with life itself. The first one-cell organisms required certain resources for maintenance of life. When those resources were adequate, then each generation became greater in number than the preceding one. If there had been no limitation on required resources, then exponential growth would have led to infinite numbers.
But as life evolved, the single-cell life form became a food resource for more complex life. With increasing complexity, each level became the resource for the next higher level. When two competitors were in perpetual competition, one inevitably displaced the other, unless something prevented it. In the absence of some counterbalancing force to maintain a stable equilibrium between the two competitors by giving each an advantage in its own territory, only one competitor survived. More...

Business Policy and Strategic Managment

This material is about decision making which determines whether a firm excels, survives, or dies. This decision process is called "strategic management." The job of strategic managers is to make the best use of a firm's resources in a changing environment.
The material is designed to help you integrate the functional tools you have learned. These include the analytical tools of production operations management, marketing management, financial management, accounting, physical distribution and logistics, and personnel and labor relation. All of these provide help in analyzing business problems. The material provide you with an opportunity to learn when to use which tools and how to deal with trade-offs when you cannot maximize the results or preferences of all the functional areas simultaneously.
Understanding a company's strategy and effectiveness is not easy. It requires that you look at how the company has come to grips with the challenges and opportunities facing it. It requires that you make judgments about whether the business or other organization is well run and how to improve its operations and results. This is a challenging job, the job of top managers of divisions or companies. It will provide you with a new understanding of how companies succeed or fail. More...

HOW TO HARNESS CHANGE FOR SUCCESS

Although we know a good deal about the conditions and processes of change,we have no satisfactory explanation of why change occurs. Possibly the explanation lies in the human capacity for becoming bored. Most of the higher species, whenever not hunting, eating, or mating, simply go to sleep - as much as twenty hours a day. Humans cannot sleep that much, and human boredom may be the true cause of social change [Hirschman, 1982]
Another asnwer is simply to assume that change is a constant in the universe, which needs no explanation. A constant is something which is always present. Populations grow and decline; fashions come and go; mountains are pushed upward and erode away; even the sun is gradully burning itself out. More...

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: AN INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Planning is an elusive subject. There is no such thing as "an effective unique way to plan". Planning is a complex social activity that cannot be simply structured by rules of thumbs or quantitative procedures. The essence of planning is to organize, in a disciplined way, the major tasks that the firm has to address to maintain an operational efficiency in its existing businesses and to guide the organization into a new and better future.
An effective planning system has to deal with two relevant dimensions: responding to changes in the external environment and creatively deploying internal resources to improve the competitive position of the firm. The maintenance of a vigilant attitude toward external changes is a major driving force behind the capability shown by firms to survive in a hostile environment. The lack of alertness to changes in economic, competitive, social, political, technological, demographic, and legal factors can become extremely detrimental for the sustained growth and profitability of firms. More...