This one's from
Ivey Business Journal via MBA Depot. We are used to sporting and military terminology in business strategy and Hardball is no exception. In summary, go easy on your competitors and you will lose. Instead, play hardball - fair, legal, ethical but
hard - by focusing on
your strengths and
their weaknessness and by exploiting
both.
On Transformations and what must have happen to make them work, John Kotter noninates 8 stages. I'm not personally fond of the 'institutionalising new approaches' wording as it suggests entrenchment... but overall you can't argue too hard against the 8 dot points. Kotter explains all in his book,
Leading Change.
It's probably a good idea to practice sensible
Change Management as well. It never ends - I think that's the secret.
Don't forget to use Google's
Trends service... or use it now if you've only just realised it's there! Trends allows search term comparisons, as in
"alfa" vs "alfa romeo". It plots it graphically and by geography. If you need to know what search terms are hot and where, this is how you find out.
Oh yeah, it's also fun.
Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know how they know - I imagine there's some proprietary rights over the
real data, so it's probably a sample, but Forbes is reporting that
Google's share of web searches has fallen. About time. Anyone remember when
Altavista was king? Google has had a long and spectacular run, as has
Yahoo!, but things do change. Interestingly noone is saying that
Microsoft's share is growing.
I have a few bones to pick with
this Forbes soapbox article. Firstly, why would it surprise anyone that cashed-up Old Media wouldn't see the light
eventually (let's not forget they mostly
nay-sayed to begin with) and then jump in buying up the new, hardier post-techwreck upstarts? Especially when the writing's now plainly on the wall? The upstart is here, banging on the door.
Whilst I accept the premise that "old media" will
adapt, I disagree with the thrust of the article,
that all previous forms of media remain intact and will continue to flourish in "a bigger pie". The pie may indeed be bigger - there are
more consumers with
more cash in hand now than 50 years ago, for starters - but the forms of media that were around 50 years ago - even 25 years ago - have certainly not '
flourished'. They may look healthy now but that's a veneer - what they are today exists only because of a painful and lengthy process of adaptation to
previous change.
Anyway,
Clem Chambers writes in part that it was said that
"The invention of radio was going to kill newspapers; the advent of television was going to kill radio, cinema and newspapers. The older among us will remember that the computer was going to banish paper from the office and replace textbooks and so on. Yet in all instances, there has never been more apparently "obsolete media" around than today".Not everyone believes - or has in the past stated - that a new invention "kills" prior art. Sometimes it does, or seems to, just as TV
did overwhelm
cinema. If you consider it to be otherwise, consider that there used to be cinemas in
every suburb, in the
tiniest communities - just as there were dance halls, community meeting rooms and public libraries
everywhere. Radio and then TV steadily drove down patronage, before cinema fought back with multiplexes; and now cinema is adapting again to DVD and online entertainment options. Cinema may not have been "killed" but it's a very different - and far less dominant- beast from, say, the 1940s version.
Exactly the same applies to
radio and newspapers. Radio was the centre of our lives for a while, the
fastest way to obtain information and a new source for entertainment. It did impact newspapers hugely and still does. Indeed newspapers adapted and
competed but they noticeably increased their op-ed content, decreased their frequency, merged and generally looked desperately around for new ways to survive. It was a major and very public reorganisation and regrouping from the 1960s to the 80s that led to what Clem sees as the flourishing "old media" we see now. But now radio, newspapers and TV itself
are threatened by the Internet. Radio is already marginalised. Yes, it has adapted, just as TV is adapting, and they both have found ways to cut costs and cling to their niches. But radio certainly isn't the beast that it was and TV is now facing the same competitive pressures - and losing both viewers and revenue.
As for
the myth of the 'paperless office', Clem is clearly not old enough to recall what offices were like
before ubiquitous computing. Look at the finance industry for just one example. Bank books were indeed books with handwritten entries. Ledgers were on paper and balances had to be made available daily - on paper. Customer records were on paper. Paper forms for new accounts. Paper forms for every transaction, credit or debit. Offices were packed with paper files that represented the account details of every customer. Typewriters where everywhere. We used handwriting a lot more. We kept everything - on paper. It was a paper-based world.
If you replicated this paper-based information collection, storage and presentation stream to the scale and breadth of today's requirements - well it wouldn't work, would it? It may have been rash to declare the
end of paper in the office, but like cinema, radio, TV and newspapers its use has changed
profoundly and -
relatively speaking - has declined
enormously.
Which brings me to Clem's claim that the
textbook is also flourishing in this modern digital age. Perhaps he means that the textbook has morphed into an online entity; because paper-based textbooks are on the nose. Children are increasingly required to have
laptops in their schoolbags, not paper-based boat anchors.
Is the PC dead? After 25 years of development we are both nowhere and everywhere. Nowhere in the sense that I for example am doing exactly what I did on a computer in 1984... type. I work with words and numbers. I may do a few other things like video editing, which back then I did equivalently as 8mm film splicing, but 90% of what I do is the same. And by everywhere I mean I do just about everything on a PC of some sort and pretty much carry one of them around all the time. But what really has changed?
They are bigger, faster, lighter, smaller and more colourful - louder as well. They can replace audio systems, video and TV systems, even photograhic paper and film. But increasing so can other devices. What's the betting that one day your cell phone will do everything your PC does today? What will that mean for PC hardware and software businesses?
Interesting
InfoWorld piece here on the PC's history and relevance.
Highly recommended for anyone in business or involved in business studies:
the McKinsey Quarterly. Some content is free upon registration. If you are doing an MBA these reports are great reference material.
The ATI purchase by AMD is interesting. It's not just a simple play to grow a company by absorbing a related but smaller company. Sure, AMD is a chip maker, but it makes the grandest chips of all - the CPUs - so buying up a graphics specialist is (a) chicken feed and (b) not going to shake the Earth. Or will it?
By buying up such a reputable graphics card maker they have guaranteed that at least
some of AMD's product will now be getting
inside some of those Intel boxes, not just their own. Intel may now have to consider putting pressure on
its customers to
drop ATI - but it surely risks anti-competitive action in so doing. And some graphics and games buffs
love ATI, so there will be resistance. It's thus another ploy by AMD to get the brand into Intel territory and to drive a wedge into the box makers. Do they stick with ATI and thus side with AMD, risking Intel's wrath, or do they side with Intel and drop ATI, accepting any collateral damage that may bring?
It's a canny move by AMD in any case. Read Infoworld's take
here.
