clair015

Most corporations consist of multiple divisions. These divisions, which set their own strategy (what we generally refer to as “business strategy”), more often than not have very little to do with one another. Take Philips Electronics with its lighting, medical equipment, and consumer electronics; ThyssenKrupp with steel, elevators, and engineering services; or smaller companies such as Trinity Mirror with newspapers, printing, and digital services. They may not be like the conglomerates of the 1960s – you can see how their portfolio of somewhat related business came about – but, in reality, the various divisions and business units do operate completely independently from one another. Yet, corporate top management invariably tries hard to formulate an overarching strategy. It endeavors to stimulate cooperation across divisions (by repeatedly shouting really loudly that this should happen), sets up corporate shared services (which invariably are seen as a mere cost and nuisance by its...

For those of you out there who like to gleefully smirk about “strategy”; let me explain it immediately here at the start (and hopefully once and for all): Strategy is a necessary condition for success. But it is not a sufficient condition – we (strategy professors) are not that stupid. I’ll explain in a sec exactly what we mean by that – a necessary but not sufficient condition – but let me first explain the gleeful smirk. I again saw it last November, when the Monitor Group went bankrupt . The Monitor Group was a strategy consulting firm founded by Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter; seen by many as the founding father of the field of business strategy. When it went bankrupt I was gleefully approached by various people in various corridors making gleeful remarks that this strategy consultant’s strategy could not even save itself, and the famous strategy guru Michael Porter couldn’t even put together a company that made enough money to pay the rent. With the underlying ergo: se...

Diederik Stapel committed a truly massive fraud. And he wasn’t even very good at it. As we know now, he completely made up the data of many – and probably most – of his (very prominent) academic publications. I have written about him before , because obviously he forms both a fascinating and worrying case. It is worrying not because it makes me suspect there are probably more of such massive fraud cases that currently remain undetected – his fraud was so huge that I have trouble imagining – perhaps naively – that it is not unique. However, I have much less trouble imagining that for every case like Stapel’s, there are probably many more of much smaller fraud, which could easily add up to something even bigger. Stapel made up all his data regarding pretty much all his publications – and got away with it for a long time. How many people might there be out there who make up only parts of their data for some of their publications…? It is like cases of insider trading, or rogue investment ...

Earlier this week, I attended a seminar at the London Business School by Michaël Bikard – a PhD candidate at MIT – who presented his research on technological inventions. Such inventions are, of course, often patented. Examining these patents allowed Michaël to determine on which technological breakthrough discoveries these inventions were based. Hence, these inventions are basically commercial applications of the more fundamental discoveries. Fairly regularly, a university or a firm builds on and commercializes its own discoveries but, quite often, such an organisation may also be building on the discoveries of others. That is possible because such fundamental discoveries will often be published, in academic journals such as Nature or Science, and hence are accessible to everyone. And that’s when it gets interesting; because on whose discoveries are firms more likely to build when working on applied inventions: on the discoveries of universities or of other companies? It matters wher...

For many decades, newspapers were big; printed on the so-called broadsheet format. However, it was not cheaper to print on such large sheets of paper   – that was not the reason for their exorbitant size – in fact, it was more expensive, in comparison to the so-called tabloid size. So why did newspaper companies insist on printing the news on such impractical, large sheets of paper? Why not print it on smaller paper? Newspaper companies, en masse, assumed that “customers would not want it”; “quality newspapers are broadsheet”. When finally, in 2004, the United Kingdom’s Independent switched to the denounced tabloid size, it saw its circulation surge. Other newspapers in the UK and other countries followed suit, boosting their circulation too. Customers did want it; the newspaper companies had been wrong in their assumptions. When I looked into where the practice had come from – to print newspapers on impractically large sheets of paper – it appeared its roots lay in England. In 171...

About a year ago, a journalist asked me: “The current crisis; you could see it as the failure of corporate governance in general, and boards of directors in specific. What radical new ideas do we see coming out of business schools in terms of how we could organise governance and boards better?” I answered him what I thought was the truth: “Ehm…. not much really”. Last week, I was in Prague, for the Annual Meeting of the Strategic Management Society ; a bunch of business school professors talking about their research. I attended a session which featured a panel of five senior professors who specialise in governance and boards. I couldn’t resist asking them the same question as the journalist had posed to me: “What radical new ideas do you have in terms of how we could perhaps organise governance and boards better?” Their answer was basically the same as mine, with equal levels of eloquence: “Ehm… not much really”. In fact, after a slightly stunned silence, one professor replied to me: “...

“ Steve Jobs – the man was fallible ” is what I wrote in October 2011. I guess it seems pretty innocent now – although there may some remnants of people who still feel offended by it – but, believe it or not, one year ago it actually triggered a small barrage of hate mail . Since then, I have read or heard others describe him as a terrorist, an asshole , and a psychopath  (which, given that many US presidents have been shown to have had psychopathic tendencies may not even be unlikely). Hey, all I said was that he was “fallible”! But all these people, in the wake of calling him a terrorist, an asshole, or a psychopath, without exception, also described him as a genius. And a person who built the greatest company on earth, changing all of our daily lives in the process. But, in fact, I am not so sure of that either… I don’t mean this as some lame attempt at a final insult – suggesting that he wasn’t even responsible for building this great company – but as a genuine question: Would...