Tom Peters made his name as a management guru by analysing what made big US companies successful.

In Search of Excellence - the hugely influential 1982 bestseller he co-authored with Robert Waterman - scrutinised Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and 40 other businesses the pair had deemed to be “excellent”.

Now, in an audio interview with the FT Management Blog, he says their focus on the largest beasts was a “guru gaffe” that helped to create a lingering misconception that the global economy is merely a division of General Electric.

These days, the companies that get him excited tend to be small- to medium-sized enterprises operating in dull industries: companies like Jim’s Group, an Australian franchiser whose activities range from lawn mowing to dog washing, or members of the German Mittelstand.

“There are actually more companies than GE in the world,” he says. And that goes for Google too.

(more…)

Senior management teams are great at coming up with strategic priorities, to the extent that many are drowning in them. But while it is platitudinous to point out that the existence of too many goals confuses staff and leads to sketchy execution, the path to rectifying strategic overload is less obvious. Yet Peter Killing, a professor at IMD, the Swiss business school, says there is a clear method that bosses can use to define and approach their company’s “must-win battles”. You can listen to him detail these steps in a 16-minute audio interview here, or click on the rest of this post for a written summary.

(more…)

Thirty years ago, a French business legend was peering into the abyss. Once classed as one of the world’s richest men, Marcel Boussac was known as King Cotton, ruler of an eponymous textiles empire that included the Dior haute couture house, which he founded. But in April 1978, the heavily indebted Boussac group was on the verge of collapse. Its autocratic but paternalistic owner, then 89 years old, had failed to respond to a surge in cheap imports from developing countries, and had also been left vulnerable by the rise of synthetic fibres. Could Mr Boussac ward off bankruptcy with yet another attempt at restructuring?

(more…)

There’s a certain type of man – middle-aged, brought up in a Commonwealth country – who, when things are going really well, will get up from his desk and (when no one is watching) dispatch an imaginary cricket ball to the cover boundary with an elegant swish.

The cover drive: perhaps human civilisation’s greatest achievement. To see David Gower, the former England captain, execute a cover drive was to experience pure bliss. I am not exaggerating.

Sport is not everybody’s cup of tea. At school, dividing lines are drawn between those who are good and bad at games. (There is also that important third category: bad at games but endlessly enthusiastic and jolly well willing to have a go.)

Continue reading “How to score a winning strategy”

Tom Glocer, chief executive of Reuters, clearly takes his blog very seriously. For instance, it contains an endearingly pedantic list of his favourite musicians, including Mahler, Grateful Dead, Kanye West and “Kool & the Gang (early)”.

The precision of that final entry marks him down as a man who wants to be thoroughly understood, who wants his staff to know that while the deep funk of 1973’s Jungle Boogie might get him on to the dance floor at the Christmas party, the post-disco pap of 1984’s Cherish will leave him frozen to his chair in horror.

Flippancy aside, the ability to convey to the world exactly what you are about is a great skill for a manager to have - and it looks like Ron Sandler, the new chairman of Northern Rock, might also have the knack.

(more…)

If history is a reliable guide to the future, McKinsey says corporate earnings in the US might fall by as much as 40 per cent from their 2007 levels, even though “few companies as yet anticipate such a blow to their earnings and general economic health”.

It bases this exceptionally bleak claim - contained in an article posted on its McKinsey Quarterly website - on an analysis of the historic relationship between corporate earnings and GDP, plus return on equity trends.

The consultancy provided some advice for executives to accompany its warning.

(more…)

Why has AG Lafley been so successful at running Procter & Gamble?  According to Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Mr Lafley is a great example of the superior leader who doesn’t reduce management to a series of “either/or” choices. Instead, he has been able to blend two seemingly incompatible courses of action into a very effective strategy.

In his recent book, The Opposable Mind, Prof Martin tells how P&G was being pushed in two different directions when Mr Lafley became chief executive in the dark days of 2000. On the one hand, the maker of Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste faced pressure to cut costs in order to compete more aggressively with own-brand goods. Yet there was an opposing school of thought that said the path to salvation lay in going upmarket by using expensive innovations to differentiate P&G brands from the me-too products.

As Prof Martin tells it - and as an advisor to Mr Lafley he has had a privileged view of the turnround - part of the genius of the P&G boss was in finding a way to reconcile these two positions into a synthesised whole that managed to satisfy both constituencies. Costs were cut but there was also a new emphasis on design and on importing external ideas that helped P&G to charge higher prices. Prof Martin calls this have-cake-and-eat-it approach ”integrative thinking”.

In this 9-minute audio interview, I chat to Prof Martin to find out how managers can structure their own problem-solving in order to avoid simplistic binary oppositions.

(more…)

It’s getting bad out there. Banks have stopped lending. Customers have stopped buying. Toshiba, Siemens and EasyJet have all issued profits warnings in the past few days. Chrysler is shutting down for two weeks in July.

I know! Why don’t we hire loads of new salespeople and get them out on the road, knocking on doors? That’s bound to change our luck.

It is not April 1. The idea of reviving door-to-door selling comes from the Boston Consulting Group. The distinguished consultancy recently published a paper in their “Opportunities for action” series called “Door-to-door sales: the forgotten channel”.

Continue reading “Desperate sales measures”

Can a leopard change its spots? Has Microsoft converted to the spirit of open innovation?

Hardly. But what the software giant has said it will now do is, for this particular company, a pretty big step.

Microsoft has announced that it will create “open connections” to its most highly-used products, make it easier for customers to shift their data out of Microsoft software packages, act “more transparently” over its use and adoption of industry standards, and try to build better relations with others in the software industry.

Sceptics and rivals are, as you might expect, unconvinced. This is all a far cry from genuine openness and “co-creation”.

But why should we always think the worst of people? And why should Microsoft bother to make any further effort to change and open up if their first nervous steps in this direction are mocked and rejected?

Give the kids from Redmond a chance, I say.