All you ever wanted to know about macroeconomics in seven minutes

Does Microsoft have Game Changing Device with Kinect

From NY Times:

Microsoft has long salivated over the notion of controlling the living room and becoming a major entertainment force. Kinect may well stand as its best bet yet for turning that vision into a reality. “This is an incredibly amazing, wonderful first step toward making interactivity in the living room available to everybody,” says Mr. Ballmer, while cautioning that Microsoft still has “a lot of work to do.”

The first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft $30,000 to build, but 1,000 workers would eventually be involved in the project. And now, hundreds of millions of dollars later, the company has a product it can sell for $150 a pop and still turn a profit, Mr. Mattrick says. (People who don’t have an Xbox can pay $300 for a package that includes the console, Kinect and a game.)

For Mr. Ballmer, Kinect is far more than a business opportunity or a pleasant diversion for consumers. It offers a moment to prove to investors and company directors that Microsoft is capable of an Applesque, game-changing moment under his leadership.

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Siemens Tightens up it Corporate Strategy

The Economist published a great story on how Siemens, battered by bribery scandal, recruited an outsider CEO and now has started to leverage the potential benefits of owning several business that could be run as stand-alone companies, operating at large scale all across the world, and avoiding to over-engineer products. The story illustrates most of the key ideas of SM3, including how to implement a corporate strategy. 

Read: A Giant Awakens
Europe’s biggest engineering firm used to be known for two things: making everything but a profit; and scandal. Now things look very different

CEO Q&A: Skander Malcolm

What is your number one tip for managing people?

People do things for their reasons, not yours. Listen. Connect. Inspire (stretch).

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

It’s hard to decide between my first boss’s advice, “You are less than half as smart as you think you are”, which set me on the right track and my father’s advice, “There is a big difference between what you think you are good at and what you are good at, which has always reminded me to understand my strengths and play to them.

From BRW, September 16- 22, 2010, p. 10.

Why Starbuck’s Failed in Australia

When Starbucks entered the Australian market in 2000, it was one of the biggest coffee chains globally, opening one new store every day somewhere in the world, notes Patterson. Its success in the US, which had not previously enjoyed a strong coffee-drinking culture, had given the brand great confidence to enter other markets including Japan (1996) and China (1998). The company now has more than 15,000 stores in 44 territories. But in mid 2008, Starbucks’ management announced that it would close 61 of its 84 Australian stores. The closures took place swiftly – within one month. Losses were enormous, including 685 jobs and A$143 million. Just 23 Australian stores were left operating in prime locations. What went so wrong?

Read the full analysis by Profeessors Paul Patternson and Marc Uncles in Knowledge @ The Australian School of Business.

Short Introduction to the Strategic Management Year of the AGSM MBA (Executive) by Peter Murmann

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 1 by Peter Moran

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 2 by Rose Trevelyan

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 3 by Shayne Gary

Short Introduction to Strategic Management 4 by Peter Murmann

James Yuille Strategies for Networking

Don’t front up at a neworking function expecting to make a sale. “Networking is an opportunity to meet people in a neutral environment, to form relationship and to built trust. People who are too anxious about making a dollar will only ostracise themselves from the rest of the group.” Other tips include: be open-minded, don’t be pushy, be a good listener and think to long-term. [...] “I have known someone [though networking] for 12 year and only last year did that relationship come up with business.”

From: BRW, September 2—8, 2010, p. 38

Peter Murmann: These tips can be applied not only to win business but also to advance one’s career.

Lehman Brothers’ did not Walk to Talk of its Mission Statement

BRW reports:  “Lehman Brothers’ mission statement nodded in all the right directions. It told employees and investors that

We are one firm, defined by our unwavering commitment to our clients, our shareholders, and each other. Our mission is to build unrivalled partnerships with, and value for, our clients, through knowledge, creativity, and dedication of our people, leading to superior returns to our shareholders.

However, the investment bank did exactly the opposite, gorging on low-quality mortgages and nearly felling the global financial system. Rather than ‘set and forget’,  [mission statements] should be part of a conversation between staff and management.”

(BRW August 26-October 6, 2010, p. 78)

New Management Focus: Invest in Relationships!

Designing an organization requires making a million decisions both large (e.g. picking a strategy) and small (e.g. picking out paper for the PC printer). It is easy to get lost in the trivial instead of focusing on getting the critical elements right. In my courses, I try to present ideas and frameworks that help identify what is important. At the recent Academy of Management Conference in Montreal I came across a phrase that was new to me. In my view,  it crystallizes what managers need to do to design an organization that is able to respond to all the unexpected events that invariably occur in the life of an organization:

The person who articulated this idea is Jodi Hofer Gittel.  She has studied the practices of the fantastically successful Southwest airlines for over a decade. Gittel was asked to comment on an earlier presentation in Montreal by the former CEO of Southwest airlines, James F. Parker. Parker remarked that when he first joined Southwest as an in-house lawyer he thought that letting employees at headquarters spend days planning the annual Halloween party was a poor use of the company’s resources. But he later came to appreciate that this activity, rather being wasteful, was an efficient way to allow low-level employees practice leadership skills that could be carried over into their regular jobs.  It was also an investment into forming strong bonds among employees that would enable them to tackle other challenges together or simply help each other out when one of them ran into problem. Top down organizational design sees it the task of management to coordinate people by dividing up the work into separate well-defined roles. An organization like Southwest asks employees to figure out in part themselves how they need to coordinate their actions to get the jobs of the airline done. Investing in strong relationships is the basis for bottom up coordination. Gittel explains that such relational coordination requires three foundations:  shared knowledge, shared goals and mutual respect. Parker went on to say that Southwest was able to deal with the dramatic fall in demand after September 11, 2001, because employees had such a strong identification with the airline, and with each other, that they were willing go along with big operational changes to help save costs. At the same time, management did bear the short-term cost of not laying off employees as most other airlines did because these violate psychological contract Southwest had developed with its people over three decades.  Parker emphasized that if people feel that the company “loves” them, then they will be much more willing to accept changes that require sacrifices on the part of individuals. This idea of coordinating people by investing in developing strong relationships rings true for me when I ask myself what distinguishes organizations that are able to change their practices and respond effectively to unforeseen challenges.

As an aside: Parker reconfirmed for the evolutionary theorist in me that organizational practices at Southwest came about in large measure because of idiosyncratic constraints the airline faced in the early period rather than because an organizational designer had evaluated different options and then decided that it was a really smart idea, for example, to just fly one particular airplane type or to encourage flight attendants to crack jokes.  Many effective organizational practices emerge without foresight. The task of the manager, then, is often simply to recognize when something works and then expand the practices and making sure not to tinker with the formula for success whose causal microstructure is not fully understood by the managers themselves. Just like an as an aspiring parent, as a manager you often don’t have to understand why a practice works as long as you understand that a practice works!

You Don’t Have to Pay Employees More Than the Competition to Keep Them Happy

Returning to Chicago for the first time in three years, I went to two of my favorite restaurants. In one, Lulu’s, most of the waitresses and busboys I had seen three years ago were still there. In the other, I recognized no one except for the owner. So I asked the owner of Lulu’s if he was paying his people more.  He said: “No.” I asked him a second time. He still said:  “No.” Confirming the lesson that many management professors emphasize in the context of the Southwest airline example, you don’t have to pay people more than the competition to keep them happy. Lulu’s is a fun place and the interior design is attractive, providing employees non-monetary rewards. Evidently the owner is also not getting on the nerves of his staff.  Jokingly he says in front of one of his female employees: “I cannot even get rid of the people I would like to see go.” The lady—who must have been working there for at least 8 years—interjects: “I knew you were going to say this.” The general lesson (except perhaps for Wall Street before the crash) is: You don’t need to pay people more than the competition. But the total rewards of working for you have to be more than the total rewards of working for someone else. Otherwise people will leave.

Constructing Relational Databases to Study Life Histories on Your PC or Mac

In this article, I present a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the rawdata. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances between two events marking the life histories of chemists. Download Article.