The Limits of Strategy: Lessons in Leadership from the Computer Industry - Softcover

Von Simson, Ernest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 144019260X ISBN 13: 9781440192609

Verlag: iUniverse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

1992 was a killing year for the four computer companies most important to business buyers over the decade. All four had been dominant suppliers of minicomputers for the past fifteen or twenty years. But on July 16, the CEOs of both Digital Equipment and Hewlett Packard were pushed into retirement. On August 8, Wang Laboratories declared bankruptcy. In December, IBM halved its dividend for the first time ever, forcing the resignation of its CEO a month later.  How did this happen? All four CEOs were clever and experienced. Two were founders of their companies; the other two highly successful career executives in their respective companies. All four were simply overwhelmed.
 
And while there was no single explanation for what happened, there were definite common themes.  They recur again and again in the many stories of this book.  Are the deadliest changes unavoidable because strategy is too easily thwarted by cluster bombs like technological velocity, cultural inertia, obsolete business models, executive conflict, and investor expectations?

The year 1992 is the fulcrum of this book, but the underlying theme is company transitions in the face of massive changes in markets, technologies, or business models – or, in other words, the limits of strategy.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

With his wife, Naomi Seligman, Ernest von Simson ran the Research Bureau, the quietly powerful think tank that observed, shaped, and guided the development of the computer industry. They got to know and admire the giants of those years -- including Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and many more.

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The Limits Of Strategy

Lessons in Leadership from the Computer IndustryBy Ernest von Simson

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Ernest von Simson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-9260-9

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................viiIntroduction..........................................................................................xi1: A Mad Dash Through History.........................................................................12: The Strategic Gold Standard: The Watsons..........................................................123: Reorganizing To Rearm: Frank Cary at IBM..........................................................354: The Competitive Limits Of Technology: Amdahl versus IBM...........................................525: Transient Technology: Travails of the Mini Makers.................................................666: First Movers: The Dawning of the Personal Computer................................................877: Defeated In Succession: An Wang at Wang Labs......................................................1098: Retrospective Strategy: John DeButts at AT&T......................................................1339: Foreign Cultures: AT&T's Recruit from IBM.........................................................15110: The Perils Of Incumbency: Sun and Oracle Take Over the Neighborhood..............................16711: Self-Accelerating Economies Of Scale: Apple, Microsoft, and Dell.................................19412: Choosing The Wrong War: IBM Takes On Microsoft...................................................21413: Powering To The Apogee: Ken Olsen at DEC.........................................................23114: Tumbling To Collapse: The Palace Guard Ousts Olsen...............................................25015: Field Force And Counterforce: DEC, HP, and IBM in Battle Mode....................................27416: Distracted By Competition: IBM Battles Fujitsu and Hitachi.......................................29017: Navigating The Waves At IBM: Akers Runs Aground, and Gerstner Takes the Helm.....................30518: Squandered Competitive Advantage: IBM Mainframes and Minicomputers...............................32419: Building A Great Business: Paul Ely at Hewlett-Packard...........................................34120: CEO Tumbles: Hewlett-Packard's Horizontal Phase..................................................35521: Limits Of Strategy?...............................................................................374Index.................................................................................................387

Chapter One

A MAD DASH THROUGH HISTORY

Before we start, let's consider a highly compressed synopsis of the computer industry's self-immolating and resurrecting history to set the book's timeline and a few overarching trends. Information Technology began modestly enough in 1822 when Charles Babbage introduced a forerunner to the computer with his beautifully handcrafted electromechanical calculator. Herman Hollerith pushed the still-fuzzy concept a key step closer to what we now know as the computer with his punch-card tabulating equipment. First used in the 1890 census, punch cards were gradually adopted for business use. Two decades later, Hollerith was able to sell his tabulating business for the then princely sum of $1 million, assuring his comfortable retirement.

Heading up the group of entrepreneurs that made Hollerith a wealthy man in 1911 was the pioneering Charles Flint, who merged a time-clock company and a scales company with the tabulating business to form the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R. It was this entity that CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. would rechristen as International Business Machines in 1924. And when James Rand Jr. bought Porter Punch, a small tabulating company, a year later, he initiated a nose-to-nose sparring match between his Remington Rand and Watson's IBM that would survive for sixty years.

Though Hollerith punch cards became indispensable to various business operations, the decks were prone to flightiness as cards were lost, missorted, and otherwise abused. One well-traveled tale concerned cards soaked in a water-pipe break and then dried in the oven of a friendly pizza joint.

The first actual computers were built from vacuum tubes during World War II; the Brits built the Colossus, and two fellows from the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, came up with the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). Meanwhile, IBM was sponsoring Howard Aiken's construction of the Mark I at Harvard. Essentially a giant electromechanical tabulating device, the Mark I's first programmer was Grace Murray Hopper, a phenomenon in her own right.

Hopper was a mathematician, physicist, serial innovator, and U.S. Navy Captain, a rank attained after she joined the Naval Reserve to support her country in wartime. During these early days, when even one of her multiple accomplishments was considered unusual for a woman, Hopper recalled a summer evening in Cambridge when the lab doors had been left open to dissipate the day's heat. When the computer choked the next morning, a moth was found caught in one of its electromechanical switches-"the first bug," she later quipped, and, indeed, she is widely credited with discovering exactly that.

The Magnetic Fifties

Commercial computing began with Eckert and Mauchly's Universal Automatic Computer (Univac), and, perhaps more important, with their substitution of magnetic tape for those pesky and problematic punch cards. The two inventors had left the University of Pennsylvania on March 31, 1946, to form a company called first the Electronic Controls Corporation and soon the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That company was sold in 1950 to IBM's longtime rival, Remington Rand. At first, Tom Watson Sr. resisted the move to electronics, largely out of fear that magnetic tape would kill IBM's immensely lucrative business in punch cards. Tom Jr.'s longer vision persevered.

Before the decade ended, the computer was in its second "generation," with transistor technology supplanting the vacuum tube. Simultaneously, computers made their first real penetration into the business office, as punch-card records were slowly transferred to magnetic tape. Soon, mainframes were pervasive, often visible in "glass houses" located near the headquarters lobby so that visitors could marvel at a company's modernity as captured in the herky-jerky movement of the tape drives.

The Do-It-Yourself Sixties

The 1960s marked my entry into the industry, eventually affording me a front-row seat from which to view the computer revolution. Naomi entered the industry in 1965 as a freelance market researcher working mostly for IBM. Around 1963, I designed and programmed a business application on a pair of transistor-based IBM computers that supported an entire insurance company with less memory and fewer cycles than today's wristwatch.

By mid-decade, the industry consisted of IBM and the so-called seven dwarfs: the Burroughs Corporation, the Control Data Corporation (CDC), the General Electric Company (GE), Honeywell, NCR (officially the National Cash Register Company until 1974), the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and the Univac division of Remington Rand-by then part of the Sperry-Rand Corporation. Every dwarf took shelter under IBM's pricing umbrella to mark up the cost...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 144019260X
• ISBN 13: 9781440192609
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 436
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH; 4950000000000; info@krega-onlinehandel.de; ; Birkenweg 31; Brakel; 33034; Deutschland