eBay/Skype split
Sad to see the ill-fated marriage of eBay and Skype end in divorce. Though it’s more fun to celebrate strategy triumphs, disasters can offer important lessons too. An Economist article focuses on the sale itself and worries about eBay’s prospects, but doesn’t assess why the original strategy didn’t work. At its most basic, it was a common issue – over-optimism about how business A customers would form a strong and easily-captured potential customer-base for business B. [I made the same mistake myself in the past!] Take a look at eBay’s presentation of the rationale offered at the time of the orginal acquisition – it’s scarily thin on any analytical justification for the hoped-for benefits. Investors should expect better.
Big car-makers ‘nibbled’ to death
Seeing in the Economist these firms seeking billions in aid recalls a comment years ago by Tom Peters re their long, slow demise. They were not killed by overwhelming force of much stronger rivals – they were ‘nibbled to death’ – by Germans in high-performance saloons, by Japanese in compacts, then SUVs, and now in hybrids. What puzzles me in all this is that they had access to what they needed to win these smaller battles. These same firms have for decades had much more efficient, well-designed models in their European and other subsidiaries. Shows how powerful a force against professional strategic management ‘not-invented-here’ can be.
Strategy in asset-heavy firms + model
the Economist says Mr Obama plans big spend to fix US infrastructure. Origins of problems that led to bridges collapsing, water mains bursting, and massive sewage leaks are easy to see – politicians can always put off long-term investment in favour of short-term give-aways. But CEOs face similar temptations. Read on for a detailed explanation of this topic and an exercise to try for yourself … Read more
Strategy in cyclical industries
The world’s biggest basic materials firms are suffering along with others as the world economy collapses, and the Economist points out that taking on loads of debt to grow and acquire others did not help. But these industries have always suffered cyclicality, even when not buffeted by extreme market conditions. Pity is that we have known how to steer away from these dangers for many years. Seems to me the same principles would have been useful to a great many other firms over the last 5-6 years. Here’s the essentials and an article that explains more … Read more
Capability-based strategy: beware ‘core competences’.
How to win by changing the game by head of Booz N America business Cesare Mainardi, and colleagues Paul Leinwand and Steffen Lauster makes a strong case for building capabilities to capture new opportunities, rather than looking inward at what you already have. Capabilities feature strongly in current strategy writing, but seem hard to make practical. The article implies, though, that they have a way of making capabilities concrete and measurable, to arrive at a ‘capability coherence’ indicator that seems to correlate with profitability – at least in the consumer products sector. This is a big step forward from the abstract and obscure concepts that feature in academic articles on the topic. Read more
Where was the strategic thinking?
I’ve been posting on strategy in the downturn for a while now, but what makes me really angry is the strategic incompetence that led to this mess [search 'incompetence' for previous posts on this]. But now I’m puzzled – Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy+Business, Economist, etc, etc, are full of advice from strategy experts on how to survive the problem, so I wondered how much they warned folk before that this was likely to happen? .. and how much advice they offered on how to make sure your organization would avoid trouble in the first place? Read more
Losers from the down-turn
Whilst business schools are seeing more applications by analysts and execs being down-sized from banks and other sectors, I see from the Economist [Giving advice in adversity] consulting firms are not faring so well. I hope they were expecting this and prepared their staffing plans for it over the last couple of years, as it’s exactly what happened after the dot-com bubble. Last time round some messed up so badly they withdrew MBA job offers within weeks of making them, and I am told Harvard B School actually banned some from hiring there as a result – now there’s strategic mastery!
Anyone experienced similar this time round?