 | Management Quotes |  |
It’s difficult to bet smart if you don’t know how to organize your starting resources. If you hear a candidate for a leadership position talk inspiringly about where she wants to be without a clear understanding of where she is and why she is there, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. This is not someone you want to cede your bets to.
— Eileen Shapiro
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Leadership
A simple test: Who does your company’s vice president of human resources report to? If it’s the CFO — and chances are good it is — then HR is headed in the wrong direction.
— Keith H. Hammonds
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Human Resources
The stock price of any company reflects investor expectations for the future. If investors expect a company to do very well, and these expectations are reflected in a high stock price, then delivering on those expectations will not increase the stock price; it will merely prevent it from falling. The only way to create sustained increases in shareholder value is to consistently surprise the market with increases in profitability. This is something that few companies have ever been able to do.
Although investors can be quite adept at spotting a winning formula and assessing a company’s ability to exploit it, they are much less able to predict whether or not a company can capitalize on changes in the basis of competition. Therefore, firms that can make these kinds of leaps have a much greater likelihood of surprising capital markets, and thereby creating shareholder value.
— Michael E. Raynor
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Finance
In the outsourcing realm, core competence thinking typically manifests itself as a prescription for firms to outsource IT-intensive processes because the IT elements that drive process capabilities rarely qualify as a firm’s core competence. But outsourcing vendors make running IT infrastructures the focus of their business. For them, these activities are their core competence. This reasoning is encapsulated in marketing slogans such as “make your back office our front office.”
Problems arise, however, when the processes these non-core IT functions support are, or become, a critical element of the value chain configuration needed to deliver improvements on that dimension of performance that is the basis of competition. In other words, just because something is not your core competence does not mean you should not do it yourself. The challenges of learning and mastering new capabilities are daunting and difficult, but the alternative is frequently competitive irrelevance.
— Michael E. Raynor
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Competition and Outsourcing
For all the insight it offers, core competence thinking can be limiting. Specifically, for a firm’s core competence to be a source of competitive advantage, it must contribute to a firm’s ability to deliver improvements that relate the current basis of competition in an industry. In other words, it is not much use being good at something if no one wants to pay you to do it. Staying competitive as the basis of competition shifts does not mean getting better and better at the same thing. It means learning the new skills and competencies needed to provide the kind and level of performance that consumers will pay for.
— Michael E. Raynor
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Strategy
Any dimension of performance that is the basis of competition must be a dimension on which existing offerings are not yet “good enough” to meet customers’ needs. That is why they are willing to pay more in order to get more of it. On other dimensions, where performance is already more than good enough or simply not as important, still greater levels of performance will not differentiate a product in ways customers value. The most successful product in a given market at any point in time will be—all else equal—the one that is able to outperform alternative offerings on the basis of competition. Responding to the rewards of market dominance, firms rush to find ways to push the limits of what is possible in order to deliver the performance that customers are willing to pay for.
— Michael E. Raynor
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Competition and Strategy
Dominating a market is a function of being able to deliver more performance than your competitors on the basis of competition. And doing that depends upon being able to closely integrate those elements in the value chain that drive performance along the relevant dimensions. Whatever does not drive that performance can be safely outsourced.
It is not enough to get this analysis right just once, however, because the basis of competition changes over time…Making the shift to delivering improvements in a different dimension of performance can require reconfiguring your value chain, bringing back in- house processes that once were outsourced, along with their associated IT infrastructures, and vice versa. It is the need to respond to these changes that makes outsourcing decisions more complex, more subtle, and more challenging than they first appear…And so, when it comes to structuring outsourcing deals, agreements must recognize the inevitability—but unpredictability—of these shifts and incorporate a means of responding.
— Michael E. Raynor
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Outsourcing
Dissatisfaction drives the sale; the cost of the dissatisfaction is the accelerator.
— Jeff Thull
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing and Sales
The only thing harder than starting something new in a bureaucracy is stopping something old. So the trick is not to ask to start something new — just start it. If you wait and ask for forgiveness for having done something you did not get permission for, you’re much more likely to get away with it than if you go and say, “Can I do it?”
— Russell Ackoff
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Bureaucracy and Organizational Behavior
A very different management philosophy is arising and will become dominant — the purpose, process, people philosophy. We are moving beyond strategy to purpose, beyond structure to process, and beyond systems to people. This will shift the basic doctrine of shareholder capitalism, and moderate it, so that if people are adding the most value, then people will increasingly have to be seen as investors, not as employees. Shareholders invest money and expect a return on their money and expect capital growth. People will be seen in the same way. So they will invest their human capital in the company, will expect a return on it, and expect growth of that capital.
— Sumantra Ghoshal
No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Management and Miscellaneous