The future was never what it used to be

Companies like Garner and IDG were seen as essential when I was running a Mac software company in the 80s and 90s: we couldn’t afford their $3000-5000 forecasts, and so eagerly sought out insights when they were excerpted elsewhere. Then, after I became an academic, I researched platform standards wars — first in PCs and then in smartphones — I worked to reconstruct their market share statistics while looking cautiously at their forecasts.

Alas, 2016 showed that (as Yogi Berra famously said) the future ain’t what it use to be. As my Wall Street Journal proclaimed this morning:

CEOs Put Less Stock in Predictions
Executives’ faith in expert forecasts fades as uncertainty grows; Brexit is latest jolt.
By Rachel Emma Silverman, Joann S. Lublin and Rachel Feintzeig
Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2016, p. B6

The forecast for business predictions these days is cloudy.

Chief executives tap consultants, expert prognostications and polls about market and political conditions to help inform business decisions. But from the Brexit surprise to the rise of Donald Trump and the frequently revised U.S. job market numbers, expert analyses have been landing far off the mark—and executives are growing wary.
…
“The so-called experts and global economists are proven as often to be wrong as right these days,” says Scott Wine, chief executive of Polaris Industries Inc., a Medina, Minn., manufacturer of off-road vehicles and motorcycles.
…
Mr. Lamneck [CEO of Insight Enterprises] says he is more closely scrutinizing the research that the company buys from advisory firms like International Data Group and Gartner. “We’ll look at, ‘What’s the real value of these services that we’re paying for?’” he says, adding that the reports are more useful for strategy ideas than for market-growth forecasts
.
A study of about 28,000 expert geopolitical predictions over 20 years [from 1984-2003] found that most were only slightly better than chance, especially when predicting events more than a year off would or wouldn’t happen, according to Philip Tetlock, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who studies forecasting.
Dr. Tetlock suggests businesses carefully track both internal and external forecasts and keep score on who gets the important calls right—a step that few companies take.
…
[CEO Robert S. Miller] and fellow directors [of International Automotive Components Group] review corporate strategy quarterly, and Brexit’s effect will be on the agenda for their July 27 review. Mr. Miller says the referendum’s result will only add to the complexity his company faces.

Still stung from his experience in 2008 [as CEO of Delphi], the IAC leader says he places little stock in current economic predictions. He is equally skeptical about predictions describing future effects of the Brexit vote.

“You always have to take this stuff with a grain of salt,’’ Mr. Miller suggests.  “You can’t run your business with only one track in mind—which is the direction that forecasters and experts are telling you it will go.’’

Or as physics Nobelist Neils Bohr reportedly said: “It is difficult to predict, especially the future.”

Understanding Apple's platform strategy: A little theory can help

Today is the first day of the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple’s annual effort to both inform and excite its ecosystem of third-party providers. As with any conference, it’s also a chance to get together with friends, old and new, particularly at parties thrown by companies that want to improve their visibility to the developer attendees.

I remember in 1988 going to my first WWDC in San Jose: our company was so poor that the two cofounders (Neil and I) had to split a single pass to be able to have any presence at all. My last WWDC was in 2003, as my company neared its end, and I went to meet with a former employee who was in town for the conference. The conference is capped at 5,000 developers, but rather than use price to discourage demand (as do most media companies), since 2014 Apple has used a lottery system to allocate seats to registered developers.

Since the early years of the Jobs II era (1997-2011), WWDC has been used to make important product and technology announcements for the broader public. As such, it also gives the business press to take another junket to San Francisco and write their annual (or quarterly) pontifications on the state of Apple, its products, market position, competitive advantage, business model, stock price or anything else.

One article caught my attention on Twitter this morning:

Apple's True Strengths Don't Lie in Innovation
By Christopher Mims
Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2016, p. B.1.
…Apple's normally festive Worldwide Developers Conference begins Monday under something of a pall. The company's first quarterly sales decline in 13 years has many people asking whether it will grow again. They also want to know how Apple, with its healthy supply of cash, could make that happen.

The conventional answer is "create a totally new product line," or its cousin, "unveil something no one has done before." That is, Apple should try to out-innovate its competitors.

That is a terrible idea. It runs counter to Apple's strengths, as well as its growth trajectory.

Here is why: Apple's core strengths are the scale of its ecosystem -- the company says it has more than one billion active devices world-wide -- and the spending power of their owners.

As someone who’s studied the theory of standards wars for two decades — and Apple’s practice of standards wars for three decades, and wrote the most-cited paper on Apple’s iPhone strategy — this seemed somewhere between foolish and idiotic.

But if you dig a little deeper, what the columnist (who seems prone to exaggerating for effect) really is doing is playing a semantic game. The language of "innovation is bad, no innovation is good” would be more accurately summarized as “risky radical innovation is bad, continuous incremental innovation is good.”

The author states

Apple is expert at offering a more polished, more accessible version of products and services that rivals have offered for years. And yet, it reaps over 90% of the smartphone industry's profit, and in 2015 its App Store delivered 75% more revenue to developers than Alphabet Inc.'s Google Play store.

If you look up “innovation” in the Oxford English Dictionary, the very first definition is:

1a. The action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms.

In other words, by offering a superior (and unique) version of a now standard product category, Apple is following the dictionary definition of “the introduction of new elements of forms.”

Meanwhile, any MBA who’s had a decent competitive strategy class can tell you that if you have a better product — and consistently superior profits — then you have successfully created some form of sustained competitive advantage that has survived efforts by your rivals to compete away that advantage and those superior margins.

Perhaps this confusion is because the author has an undergraduate neuroscience major but no business degree.

But once we get away from the terminology problems, I did find one paragraph that seemed both factual and prescient:

In any case, I think it will be many years before mobile is toppled as the dominant platform. The PC ruled for nearly 30 years, and we are less than a decade into the age of the iPhone.

I don’t agree with the conclusion that Apple (or Google or Facebook) shouldn’t pursue related diversification. However, I do agree that it must feed and harvest its mobile “cash cow” (as BCG defined it 45 years ago) while continuing to search for new growth opportunities.

As an Apple shareholder, I’m disappointed at the loss in price and market cap over the past year as it lost its growth multiple. But I still think there’s enough of the company’s DNA (even after the loss of its visionary founder) to propel it to new growth as it finds a way to meet needs unmet by its many competitors and imitators.

Target's Pulitzer-losing strategy

The success of Target over the past two decades has been built by offering better quality merchandise at lower prices, creating a unique position (and loyal following) between traditional discounters and higher-end retailers. As with other discount retailers, Target has partnered with higher end brands, providing volume in exchange for their cachet.

The latest effort was Sunday, when Target offered an exclusive collection from Lilly Pulitzer, a line of colorful women’s clothing originally based in South Florida. My teen tells me this is the brand of sorority girls and other Southern Belles. The line is normally sold in expensive boutiques, and thus Target provided both convenient distribution and the promise of better prices.

However, the demand vastly exceeded Target's expectations. As with healthcare, the initial focus was on the crashing. However, as it turns out, the more systemic problem occurred in the retail stores.

At the two stores nearest to our home, the clothing sold out in the first hour, with cosmetics and accessories lasting about a day — a pattern repeated around the country. It was a one-time deal, with no restocking planned. Target later admitted that it expected that the sales (and traffic) would last weeks and not hours.

Instead, enterprising shoppers cleaned out the stores — one shopping cart at a time — to resell the products upon eBay. By our count, there are 38,000+ “Lilly Pulitzer for Target” products on eBay at 3x the original price. Lilly’s fans have vowed to boycott the online sales with their own hashtag (#LillyforeBay).

Avoiding this problem isn't rocket science. Our generation knows this as the Rolling Stones (or Springsteen) concert ticket problem — limit 2 per customer. The former newsmagazine Newsweek reports that H&M imposes limits on similar promotions.

Per Fortune, Target claims that only 1.5% of the merchandise is being resold, but I suspect that includes the less desirable accessories. The fashionistas denied even a single copy of the iconic Lilly Pulitzer shift dress — despite being there when the doors opened at 8 — would consider the problem more serious than Target wants us to believe.

The Pulitzer fiasco has certainly undercut Tarzhay’s image of chic fashion and operational efficiency. And apparently this happened four years ago when Target sold the Missoni designer brand. A brand is a shortcut for quality — including reliability and predictability – which is the opposite of what this weekend’s shoppers experienced.

If they were targeting boomer geezers it wouldn’t be a big deal, but irritating the pre-teens and teens that are its future customers is equivalent to pissing in the soup. It’s a perfect plan to send these young shoppers back to mall for H&M and other specialty realtors.

So — as in so many other aspects of business — here is another example where the execution is more important than the strategy.

Is Samsung the next Sony or next Apple?

Tonight I ended another quarter teaching MBA again at my alma mater, the second time teaching IT innovation strategy this year. There isn’t a great fit of the topic to my current employer, so it’s nice to be able to moonlight (with permission) to revisit the course I created at UCI more than 13 years ago.

The students did a number of final projects, and since I’ve been too swamped to blog here (while rarely blogging at my academic blog) — I thought I’d share a few observations here.

One topic that hit me near the end of the last class is that Apple sort of looks like the next Sony. Sony was the great consumer electronics innovator of the 1960s through the 1980s (Trinitron, Walkman) that failed to keep up its innovation as the rate of technological change and is now losing money badly in a commodity business. So with Steve Jobs gone, I have been wondering if Apple will also slow its rate of innovation and become an undifferentiated premium producer in a commodity business.

But my students suggest that however quickly Apple becomes a commodity producer, Samsung is getting their first. 2014 has brought various headlines about how Samsung’s smartphone market leadership is producing losses not cash cows.

By offering slightly nicer Android phones, Samsung is competing within a standard rather than between standards. So while Americans will pay a premium for minor improvements, developing country Android buyers are quite happy to buy Xiaomi, ZTE, Huawei, or some other generic brand.

Samsung does compete in some capital-intensive markets with high entry barriers, but (as with the DRAM of the 1980s) such businesses are prone to commodity price wars. Samsung’s attempt to create unique technology (notably Tizen) has failed: they are a long way from being the next Apple. It has a high rate of R&D spending but not a high rate of R&D outcomes.

Quoting from Geoff Moore’s book (a required text), the students recommend that Samsung compete on integration abilities. I think it’s a plausible idea (if they can ever learn to do UI and software) — they have an unprecedented scope of products, and so if anyone (beyond Apple) has the opportunity to do this, they do.

One thing that is clear: Apple is not the next Sony — yet. And this gives me a chance to quote from a newspaper clipping that I set aside a month ago. Here is an excerpt of an interview with CEO Tim Cook:

MR. [Gerard] BAKER: I want to ask about some of the broader strategic questions for Apple. This phenomenally successful iPhone, which continues to churn out extraordinary profits. You’ve got a very high margin, relatively low volume in terms of total share of the smartphone market.

Now you’re about 15%, 16% globally of the smartphone market. That model has been compared to the Mac versus PC model of old. You have these beautiful devices, which you were first with, which people adopted very, very quickly, but which were a smaller and smaller share of the market.

In the end, the Windows model blew away the Mac, in terms of market share. Is that a risk here?
MR. COOK: I don’t think all market share is created equal. Our objective has never been to make the most. We’ve always been about making the best.

The analogy to the Mac isn’t a good one. It’s clear when you look back what was happening in terms of the Mac platform was there weren’t enough apps on the Mac platform. Customers began to leave, because there weren’t enough apps. Look at iPhone and iPad. I get more customer notes than any CEO alive, I’m sure. I’ve gotten zero saying, “You don’t have enough apps on your platform.”

So Cook makes two crucial points. First, for decades its identity and positioning have been about being better, not cheaper. Secondly, there is no evidence (even with Android’s superior share) that Apple has any problems with developer loyalty (at least in developed countries).

But the most important point is the one that he hinted at but didn’t finish: “I don’t think all market share is created equal.” Samsung’s smartphone profits are dropping while Apple’s rise. Every year, I have to remind my students that unprofitable growth destroys value for firms — if necessary, reciting the old adage “losing money on every unit, but making it up on volume.”

So while Sony is losing to commoditization, and Samsung is fighting it, Apple (thus far) is keeping at bay. For now, Samsung looks more like it's trailing Sony 10-15 years behind than it is catching up to Apple.

Google Show Greed Trumps Values Every Day

Google once promised that is mission was “to organize the world’s information”. Nominally that remains its mission today.

On the 10th anniversary of its IPO, in this morning's WSJ, Rolfe Winkler shows how that all changed:

Just before Google Inc. went public 10 years ago, co-founder Larry Page said he wanted to get the search engine's users "out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible."

Today, Mr. Page's Google often is doing the opposite: Providing as much information as possible to keep users in Google's virtual universe.

At first, leveraging its dominant share in search, Google was content to have people linger longer (ala Yahoo or later Facebook) to sell them to more advertisers. Now they want to monetize that customer hold directly by doing transactions and taking a piece of the action. The dead tree (and online edition) shows the before and after — Google the indexer of the Internet vs. Google the horizontally diversified Internet portal:

In other words, Google once created an ecosystem (including APIs and a two-sided advertising market) and wanted to make its ecosystem partners successful. Now, in its relentless pursuit of growth, it is crowding aside its onetime partners and trying to take more money from its customers.

This is exactly what DEC, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and countless other tech companies have done over the decades. Joining an ecosystem is a viable startup business until the ecosystem sponsor wants to take that business away. The book Keystone Advantage refers to this as an ecosystem “dominator.” Among tech companies, only IBM seems to be a reliable partner for win-win alliances, in part because its integration services business model allows it to make money with almost any sort of component.

Of course, this was inevitable. Companies like Google want to grow, because it supports the stock price and puts more money into the hands of shareholders, employees and executives. Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $32 billion apiece, I’m guessing it’s less about the money and more about the control, the ego, the success of making the world’s most dominant influential company of all time.

As we teach in strategy, there’s only two ways to grow: reach more customers or make more money out of your existing customers. If Google is serving almost everyone on the Internet, it either has to connect more people to the Internet (who will be less profitable than their existing customers) or sell more stuff to those already locked into Google. Obviously (with its $50 billion in cash horde and 60+% gross margins) it’s doing all of these things.

Unfortunately, a dominant vertically integrated (and horizontally diversified) monoculture is bad for the economy, bad for consumers and bad for society. It takes transactions that should be happening in the market and internalizes them into an internal hierarchy. Europe has been trying to nibble at the edges of Google’s efforts at Total World Domination for years, but had little impact. The U.S. seems disinterested, because the GOP believes in free markets and the Democrats receive millions in campaign donations from Google's wealth.

Normally we can count on the curse of success to eventually kick in: big companies either become complacent, bureaucratic or otherwise lose their way (cf. GM, Microsoft). The Google founders seem determined to make sure this doesn’t happen during their lifetime, which could be 30 years (with a normal retirement) or 50 (if they last like Warren Buffett). Since I’m older than both men, I may not live to see the end game — which is a depressing thought.

Upstream vs. downstream complementarities in Apple-IBM deal

Despite coverage to the contrary, Tuesday's announcement that IBM will help sell Apple products to enterprise customers is long overdue and merely the latest example of cooperation between the firms spanning more than two decades.

The new thing is that — unlike previous deals — the cooperation announced by Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty reflects downstream complementarities rather than upstream ones.

In their seminal book Co-opetition, Brandenburger and Nalebuff defined complementarity between products X and Y as meaning that if someone bought X, then Y would be more valuable (and vice versa). This basic principle is behind nearly any positive-sum (“win-win”) strategic alliance today.

Yes, Apple’s early successes began to fade when IBM introduced its PC in August 1981, and its 1984 Macintosh introduction was aimed squarely at Big Blue and its user-unfriendly DOS PC. But the two companies have been cooperating far longer than they competed, largely through their cooperation in upstream components.

The big cooperation surprise came not in July 2014 but October 1991. Then Apple CEO John Sculley and IBM President Jack Kuehler announced that Apple would be using PowerPC CPUs based on IBM's proprietary RISC chips (Motorola was the third partner in the alliance).

At the same time, Apple and IBM launched two Silicon Valley-based software joint ventures based on a common rivalry with Microsoft. Taligent nearly killed Apple (and thus helped me find a new career) by siphoning off Apple’s top engineers to work on an operating system that it never shipped. Kaleida was intended to solve CD-ROM scripting challenges, but was swept aside by the emergence of Java and the commercial Internet.

A few years later — at the depth of Apple’s self-inflicted slide towards irrelevance — IBM helped Apple with problems creating hardware in its fastest-growing and most profitable segment, laptop computers. It sold its unique laptop hard disk to Apple (but not to HP) and also built the 1997 PowerBook 2400c for Apple at its IBM Japan division.

Fast forward to the 21st century. IBM could have begun selling Apple's hardware at any point since it divested its PC division in 2005. This is exactly why the company exited the market segment that it had created 24 years earlier: to get rid of a low-margin commodity hardware business and give it more flexibility to sell higher-margin integration services to large corporations.

The question is: what took them so long? The iPad came out in April 2010 and Steve Jobs has been gone for nearly three years. Ever since the Macintosh (1984) and particularly the LaserWriter (1985), Apple has been making products that would appeal to large companies, but lacked the sales, support and integration capabilities needed to address their customer’s complete requirements. (Only us Mac graybeards remember the 1988 Apple/DEC alliance that was intended to address these problems.)

Today, the two companies are not just looking over their shoulders at Microsoft, but also Google as well. The iPhone and iPad have already been widely adopted in big companies — spawning the IT acronym BYOD — but the new alliance should (like other successful downstream complementaries) generate incremental revenue growth for both parties.

However, there was one glaring omission in the latest Apple-IBM collaboration announcement: cloud computing. Apple has a retail presence with its true believers that is central to its integration strategies, but lacks the scale to compete with the industry leaders, Amazon and Google. IBM is their major competitor as a wholesale supplier, but (unlike Amazon and Google) does not compete with Apple’s retail offerings.

In the long run, Apple will unable to go it alone in cloud computing. We’ve all seen the risks that companies take relying on Amazon (cf. Netflix) or Google (cf. Samsung) as a supplier who is also a competitor. As in the PowerPC days, Apple should not only be leveraging IBM’s scale but working to attract others to its platform as the last honest broker in cloud computing.

Apple's curious acquisition

Apple’s reported efforts to buy Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion have been the subject of endless speculation since it was first reported Thursday. We don’t know Apple’s actual reason for interest — or even if the deal will happen — since Apple has yet to make any official announcement. (As with all such leaks, this leak seems intended to influence the deal — presumably by the sellers to force Apple to follow through.)

Certainly this is out of character for Apple, since its largest previous deal was $0.4 billion to buy NeXT, the basis of its OS X. But the press frenzy about how precedented the deal is seems a bit exaggerated. After all, there’s always a first time for anything, including its successful acquisitions such as the purchase of NeXT, PA Semi, and Siri. (Google got a lot of flack in 2006 for spending $1.65 billion to buy YouTube).

Is the acquisition a good idea? When we (i.e. strategy professors) teach related diversification by acquisition, there is a standard list of pros and cons.

On the pro side, an acquisition is usually about time to market — accomplishing something more quickly than you could do on your own. It can acquire technology, customers, distribution, products and people. For the latter, Silicon Valley normally thinks in terms of engineers. However, an acquisition can also bring new executives: the NeXT purchase brought in the new management team of Apple — not only Steve Jobs, but essentially it’s entire management team other than the CFO that Gil Amelio installed (Fred Anderson) and the COO Jobs stole from Compaq (Tim Cook).

Finally, there is the opportunity for the newly acquired company to be more successful under its new owner than as a stand-alone company. This might be due to better management, better distribution or more available capital. For example, in our recently completed business plan competition at KGI, most of the proposed startups would sell out to a large pharma or biotech company before bringing products to market, rather than build a global retail sales force from scratch.

On the con side, there is the question of strategic fit: do the new assets fit with the organization, how will the products, people and culture be integrated — and are the business models compatible? The post-acquisition integration can be a huge distraction (but usually when buying a larger company, as with Microsoft-Nokia, Oracle-Sun or HP-Compaq).

And with any acquisition, there’s always the risk of over-paying. Perhaps the assets are valuable, but CEOs have a tendency to overpay — whether to put their mark on their company, grab the headlines or just to run a larger company.

In Beats Electronics, Apple is buying two lines of business. One is Beats by Dre, the headphones division that has nearly two-thirds (61.7%) of the US premium headphone market — nearly 3x that of Bose, which created the segment.

It’s a monstrously successful brand, but there’s little technology there. The two music industry execs who formed Beats outsourced their initial headset design to the father-son team that runs Monster Cable Products (which, lacking negotiating savvy, failed to get an equity stake in the venture they helped create). The success of the company (even more so than for Bose) is based on marketing rather than technology:

"They certainly don’t need the headphone company, which makes second rate headphones based on marketing," says music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz. He thinks Apple would be a lot more interested in Beats’ music streaming service. Steve Jobs famously opposed the subscription music model and, instead, championed iTunes' current model, where you buy a song outright.

This points to its other line of business. The nascent Beats Music steaming service leverages the value of the Beats brand with teens, but (like Apple and Amazon) is far behind market leader Spotify.

By one standard, Apple is certainly overpaying. The company’s exponential growth is not sustainable and its revenues are less than $2 billion. As a company with little technology and strong emphasis on style and brand, Beats is essentially a fashion company. Any fashion acquisition is a risky acquisition.

Will Beats by Apple seem as authentic or appealing to teens as Beats by Dre (when Dre was still the owner)? For that matter, how many fashion companies are able to sustain their position of a period of decades? In my adult lifetime, I can only think of one firm that has been successful: Nike.

Which brings us to the final possible value of Beats. The company has shown it has been able to understand teen fashion and create markets that didn’t exist. Is that because of the cofounders, Dr. Dre (aka Andre Romelle Young) and music mogul Jimmy Iovine? Or is there a depth of marketing — both market sensing and market creating — within Beats that could help Apple better sell unnecessary luxuries to middle class teens and college students?

Although it’s a large deal for Apple, it’s essentially a minor bet — hardly on the scale of Google buying YouTube or WhatsApp, let alone Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia.. Apple has more than $150 billion in cash (mostly offshore), and has few other options to create meaningful growth. With annual revenues of more than $170 billion, the Beats sales would not be material to Apple any time in the near future — if ever.

So if Apple gains an additional window into the soul of the 13-25 year-old set — or rebuilds its foothold in the music industry — then the deal could prove to be a shrewd one. As it is, it’s a gamble — but Apple didn’t get to where it is without taking gambles (such as the iPhone). It may be Tim Cook’s largest gamble to date, but it won’t be the last one he takes as CEO.

Sell the car, not the Kool-Aid

As promised, on Thursday Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted the logs from the disastrous NY Times long-distance test drive of his Model S sedan. Late Thursday, Broder himself posted his own attempt to reconcile his experience with the data.

At first, I was puzzled by Musk’s quixotic attempt to pit his famous money-losing startup against the country’s oldest and most valuable media brand. Yes, as a former engineer-entrepreneur, I get that engineers will scream “user error” at the top of their lungs rather than even consider that there might be problems with their baby.

There’s also the common sight of the rich egomaniacal founder — in this case, the highest profile multi-industry entrepreneur since Howard Hughes — assuming that a few business successes meant that he possesses the Midas touch, papal infallibility, or genius worthy of a Nobel prize.

Then I read the comment logs on some of these stories. Yes, the polarization seems worthy of a political campaign, but what surprised me was the vituperation against the NY Times reporter, in effect accusing him of being part of the evil Big Oil conspiracy to kill little ol’ Elon. Even one of my normally rational (except on politics) former co-workers has been tweeting that with a NYT reporter “you wouldn’t think guy would lie” and that the reporter was “unethical.”

The tactics being used by Tesla are straight out of a political campaign: Musk is not trying to convince the general public, he’s trying to protect his base, the true believers who’ll pay $80k or $100k for a car that makes them feel good about saving the planet but provides transportation equivalent (or sometimes inferior) to a $30k Toyota.

Psychologists tell us such an approach works due to “confirmation bias”: if you’ve plunked down a $5k-$40k deposit to get on the Model S waiting list, you will tune out messages that might suggest you’re getting a lemon. (I wonder how these buyers of this 400+ hp car will feel reading Tesla’s advice to avoid rapid acceleration and keep the speed under 60 on long-distance trips, let alone turning off the heater in the winter).

Perhaps Tesla’s near term goal is to keep those intended buyers from demanding their deposits back, since the company has been spending that money to keep the doors open. Or (as with a political campaign), perhaps Musk really believes what fawning reporters say within the Silicon Valley echo chamber. As was Steve Jobs in the Job I era, he’s likely surrounded by a staff who drink the Kool-Aid.

As with any product failure or business dispute, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Some more neutral parties, such as Slate, Business Insider, Wired and particularly the Atlantic attempted to reconcile the new data with the original article by John Broder. And Broder himself wonders if some of the speed data was thrown off by using smaller wheels than normal.

If this were an actual court case, then Musk would lose — and lose badly — for two reasons. First, Broder is a more credible witness. He was there when the car was being driven, has witnesses and some of his explanations (like driving around a parking lot looking for the charger) disarm Musk’ accusations. He concedes that a caption (usually written by an editor) was misleading. In the end he’s willing to admit that if his sole goal was to maximize battery life, there are things he would have done differently.

The second problem is that, as Perry Mason or Matlock would be quick to point out, there’s no motive. Why would a NYT reporter who since 2009 has been “the Washington bureau reporter responsible for coverage of energy, environment and climate change” try to destroy America’s most famous electric car company here. We’re not talking Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal here. Meanwhile, with the survival of his company riding on this one product, Musk’s motives to present the data in the best possible light are quite clear.

Under other circumstances, Musk might able to win support from pro-business conservatives who distrust the NYT after years of editorializing on its news pages. (Some have compared Musk’s war against the press to that of Richard Nixon 40 years ago). But this audience is (for once) ready to believe the NY Times over a crony capitalist who sought $700 million in Federal loan guarantees (and won $465m) to keep his cleantech startup going.

The Model S is not the first cutting-edge product to fail a product review: this sort of thing has been happening for PCs, software and smartphones for decades. Sometimes, it’s because the rough edges are still showing: Broder was clearly misled by the onboard computer’s range estimates. In other case, the reviewers (again like real customers) use the product in ways that the engineer would not or would not even imagine.

In the end, Tesla will have to recognize that they made a mistake in providing their car in the middle of winter to an independent reporter, and telling him that he could drive up the Eastern seaboard using only the company’s “Supercharger” stations. The company will need better software, an onboard charging station locator, and 7/24 tech support equipped with better scripts for dealing with range anxiety in cold weather and other adverse conditions.

As with anything else in life, we learn most from our mistakes. Tesla will have a much better product (and make Elon Musk even richer) if they make a Model S that anyone can use rather than trying to sell the Kool-Aid to true believers.

Bluster as a substitute for execution

Cross posted from the Cleantech Business blog.

In the ongoing search for electric car nirvana, the Tesla Motor Company has enjoyed an unusually charmed existence. Perhaps it’s the Silicon Valley mystique, perhaps it’s the Midas touch attributed to its co-founder Elon Musk — who became a centimillionaire from selling PayPal to eBay, and then used his funds to start a car company, a rocket company and a solar company.

After discontinuing its $100k niche toy, the Tesla Roadster, the future of the company depends on producing and selling its $60-100k Model S sedan in volume. The latter effort was dealt a major blow Sunday when the NY Times reported the very real problems in an actual test drive:

Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway
By JOHN M. BRODER

Washington — Having established a fast-charging foothold in California for its electric cars, Tesla Motors has brought its formula east, opening two ultrafast charging stations in December that would, in theory, allow a speedy electric-car road trip between here and Boston.

But as I discovered on a recent test drive of the company’s high-performance Model S sedan, theory can be trumped by reality, especially when Northeast temperatures plunge.

The problem was that — after several close calls — the car ran out of power shy of the next charging station, requiring a complex and time-consuming flatbed tow. Perhaps it was the effect of cold upon the battery life, perhaps it was the power consumed by the heater, perhaps it was bugs in the software or hardware.

Still, there’s no reason to think that the problems didn’t actually happen. In response, one would presume that Tesla would both improve its products and add additional charging stations to enable long-distance recharging.

Instead, the notoriously thin-skinned Musk tried to smear the messenger, both on a CNBC interview and on his twitter account:

@elonmusk: NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour.

In responses to major media outlets, the NYT stood by its story:

The Times's February 10 article recounting a reporter's test drive in a Tesla Model S was completely factual, describing the trip in detail exactly as it occurred. Any suggestion that the account was "fake" is, of course, flatly untrue.

Our reporter followed the instructions he was given in multiple conversations with Tesla personnel. He described the entire drive in the story; there was no unreported detour. And he was never told to plug the car in overnight in cold weather, despite repeated contact with Tesla.

Apparently the attack was an effort to prop up the stock price, which fell 4% in response to the NYT story. (That’s about $175 million in market cap — more than any of us mere mortals will ever see in a lifetime).

Despite the stress on the company and its stock, this is a textbook example of how not to handle a PR crisis. But it appears that within a NASDAQ-traded public company, no one can tell the emperor of Tesla to put his clothes on, or to listen to professional advice. As The Atlantic summarized its media report: “Elon Musk's Crusade Against The New York Times Isn't Helping Tesla.” The WSJ wonders whether this sort of concerted effort to intimidate reviewers will discourage coverage in the future.

Of course, this happened the same week that Musk — an expert in all things everywhere — was offering advice on Boeing 787 batteries. As Seeking Alpha dryly put it:

Tesla has burned through $1.25B in free cash flows in order to develop the company, and we expect that terrifying test-drives of electric vehicles from Tesla Motors will continue. We find it amusing that Elon Musk is willing to help out Boeing's Dreamliner due to the battery issue. We would like to remind Elon Musk and his team that they need to first fix their problems with their products before trying to be a superhero with the products of other companies.

Cruising range is an inherent limitation of the current generation of electric cars, and thus “range anxiety” will be a major obstacle to adoption. Musk has done himself — and the industry — no favors by helping to call attention to the article, rather than (as his employees apparently were trying to do) work with the reviewer to understand and correct the problems.

Picking a CEO: narcissists need not apply

Narcissism is rampant among high achievers, whether movie starts, business executives or politicians. It seems like the more successful some people get, the more they surround themselves with bootlickers who cater to their ego rather than tell them what they need to hear.

Writing on the HBR blog, executive headhunter Justin Menkes recalls the advice he gave a CEO looking to groom a potential successor from among his high-achieving subordinates.

How do you know when someone can make the leap from high performer to CEO? There is one driving factor that determines the answer: narcissism.

Those selected for development have one universal trait in common: They are by definition high achievers. But there is a difference between those superstar achievers that can make the leap to CEO and those that will implode: To what degree do they feel invigorated by the success and talent of others, and to what degree does the success of others cause an involuntary pinch of insecurity about their own personal inadequacies? Only an individual who feels genuinely invigorated by the growth, development, and success of others can become an effective leader of an enterprise. And it remains the most common obstacle of success for those trying to make that leap.

Menkes has a checklist from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory:

• Are the individual's relationships with others based on honest, intimate exchanges, or are they formed using a dynamic that regularly reinforces the narcissist's role as a "hero"?
• Does the individual often talk about how his star qualities make him distinct from his peers?
• Does he like to be the center of attention?
• Does the remark, "I insist on getting the respect that is due me," resonate with his worldview?

All of these items play to a twisted egocentrism that assumes the world exists for the benefit of the high achiever. But if eliminating narcissists from consideration is necessary, IMHO it is not sufficient.

A related predictor of failure that I’ve seen time and time again is an insular approach to gathering information, getting advice and making decisions. It seems to be the single best predictor of failure among US presidents — where the raw power being wielded causes senior aides to jealously (and zealously) guard their access. (Cases in point: Nixon, Carter).

So yes, the narcissist has a particularly pathological form of reality denial. But if a leader can’t deal with the world as it is — rather than how he or she imagines it to be — the final outcome is going to be the same.

Cutting their way to greatness, Espoo Edition

The news from Espoo this morning was grim: Nokia is axing 10,000 (about 8%) of its workers over the next 18 months, in hopes of getting operating expenses (for its core Devices & Services division) down to €3 billion by the end of 2013 (vs. €5+ billion in 2010). The company will be closing R&D facilities in Germany and Canada and a factory in Salo, Finland.

In conjunction with a new earnings warning, Nokia’s market cap fell to €8.3 billion, shares shares fell to their lowest level in 16 years, less than 3% of its peak back in late 2000. The cumulative effect of the layoffs mean that in five Nokia employees will be gone by the end of 2013.

In conjunction with the announcement, three executive vice presidents are resigning at the end of the month “to pursue other opportunities outside of Nokia”. CEO Stephen Elop offered touching testimonials upon their departure:

"Jerri has made a positive impact on Nokia's advertising, marketing and brand efforts. Our marketing has made great strides under her leadership," said Stephen Elop. "I will particularly miss the fresh insight and new energy that Jerri injected into the Nokia brand."

"Mary's leadership has been instrumental in our efforts to connect the next billion people to the Internet through innovation in new devices and services," said Stephen Elop. "Under her direction, Nokia has brought new opportunities to consumers throughout growth markets and contributed strongly to Nokia's business. I will miss the value she has brought to Nokia."

"During his 16-year Nokia career, Niklas has successfully supported our growth and transformation through leadership roles in groups ranging from services to, most recently, sales, marketing, supply chain and IT," said Stephen Elop. "Niklas has been a valued partner to me during my tenure at Nokia and his many ongoing contributions will be missed."

If that were true, why were they all forced out? For that matter, why are these execs being forced out and not the CEO? So far, there’s no evidence that any part of Elop’s strategy is working.

Mercury News tech columnist Troy Wolverton was even more cynical about Nokia’s announcements, as he tweeted:

Troy Wolverton @troywolv
Nokia's press release about its restructuring is an amazing collection of Orwellian doublespeak, starting with its headline...

Troy Wolverton @troywolv
Here's the headline: "Nokia sharpens strategy and provides updates to its targets and outlook"

Troy Wolverton @troywolv
What that really means, in plain English: "We're firing 10,000 people and our bottom line is going to be much worse than we forecasted."

Troy Wolverton @troywolv
I love this line too: "...Nokia is making changes to its management team by tapping into the strong leadership bench at the company."

Troy Wolverton @troywolv
What that really means, of course: We're firing a bunch of executives...

Nokia was the world’s largest handset vendor from 1998 until this year, when it was passed by Samsung. Its market share has been in a freefall, and the profitability story has been even worse as it lost the profit sanctuary that the N-series phones once provided b.i. (before iPhone).

Part of the problem is that Nokia didn’t move quickly enough to respond to the iPhone. I was a consultant to Symbian (which made the N-series operating system) from Dec. 2006 to Dec. 2008, and while there was an appreciation of some of the iPhone features, I don’t think the company was really worried. For indirect evidence, it appeared that the Nokia execs were even more confident than their English software supplier — until Android came along. Today, Apple sells more smartphones than Nokia and earns most of the handset industry profits.

Right now, I don’t see how Nokia’s going to turn things around. On the one hand, as they phase out Symbian they’ve given up platform control for most of their smartphones — having cast their lot with Microsoft. On the other hand, Samsung is also dependent on others for its smartphone platform — i.e. Google — with only about 12% of its phones that carry the Bada operating system.

Theories for the differing outcomes abound. One is that Samsung bet on the right smartphone and Nokia didn’t. Certainly no one is enjoying great success with Windows mobile phones, while Android is the bulk of the smartphone market. However, I think the Nokia’s long indecisiveness was part of the problem: it shipped its first Windows in late 2011, 2 1/2 years after Samsung’s first Android phone.

Today, there‘s one differentiated platform — the iPhone — and a bunch of commodity smartphone suppliers competing on execution — via time to market, small feature enhancements, and of course price. Nokia made its money when it had customer lock-in as the only game in town, and its DNA is not well-aligned for today’s competitive price-sensitive markets.

But in hearing about the latest round of cuts reminded me of Silicon Valley companies also trying to cut their way to greatness, notably HP and Yahoo. Cuts will not make a mediocre company great — they will only cause it to lose less money. Success will come from growing the top line, and thus far Nokia under Elop (and his immediate predecessors) has been heading in the wrong direction.

Nokia resembles HP in that both were once world-renown innovative companies, and both have stumbled as the market matured and price premiums disappeared. Apple was in this place 15 years ago, but were turned around by brilliant market-driving innovation. However, the Apple Steve Jobs turned around was smaller, more nimble — and more scared — than Nokia is today. If there’s a reason that Nokia’s slide will eventually end, so far I haven’t seen it.

Changing the world through execution

In teaching strategy, I always note the tendency of us academics — as well as executives — to over-emphasize strategy development over strategy implementation. Now the world’s most famous open source developer — a 42-year-old Finnish-American father of two — is making the same point as he rejects accolades and perhaps even a €1 million Millennium Technology Prize.

The Register quotes the originator of Linux as saying:

One of the main reasons I think Linux came to be successful in the first place was that I never had very lofty goals. The goalposts for me were always a few weeks out - never some kind of "one day, this will change the world". It was much more pedestrian than that, and I actually think that's the only way to make real progress: one small step at a time, not looking too far ahead to see the details.

People like to idolize the "ideas" and "inspiration", but in the end, almost anybody can have an idea. Getting things actually done is where people stumble.

I couldn’t agree more. The article doesn’t mention it, but Linux was actually a latecomer to the Unix knock-off market: Linus Torvalds started Linux because he couldn’t get Minix to do what he wanted, and the various *BSD variants were clearly technically superior to Linux through most of the 1990s.

I found the Reg’s article by reading a Tweet® by my friend Matt Asay:

Matt Asay @mjasay

Torvalds: 'I'm no visionary'. Anyone can have an idea. Execution is what matters http://zite.to/HTAbGo <Changed the world by not trying to

Anyone who’s read the history of Linux and Linus Torvalds knows (as Matt does) that Linus didn’t set out to change the world. But he followed up his idea with good and consistent execution, and imposed a discipline on his bazaar community so that the contributed code met his implementation standards.

Creative destruction creates carcasses

Veteran tech journalist Therese Poletti this morning looks at the tough choices facing the new(ish) CEOs of three established tech companies. The double-deck headline in Marketwatch says it all:

April 3, 2012, 12:01 a.m. EDT
Can new CEOs fix H-P, RIM and Yahoo?
Commentary: H-P has best hopes, future grimmer for RIM and Yahoo

She begins the story by quoting Clay Christensen from his talk last week at Xerox PARC — a nice touch and obviously a point of view I wholeheartedly endorse.

But then she gets to the money quote:

Once companies have lost their edge, can they ever climb back? In the case of H-P, RIM and Yahoo, the outlook appears to be the best for H-P, worse for RIM, and Yahoo could eventually just be sold, or cut up into bits.

“They have moved to the carcass phase of the business,” said Stephen Diamond, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. “That is a very bad sign. That is very interesting for lawyers and vulture funds. But to expect those companies to turn around technologically is all but impossible. H-P may have narrowly averted that,” he said, adding that he believes the tech giant needs to eventually find a more visionary CEO with more tech or engineering creds, or it too will lose its way.

Carcasses? Ouch!

The pessimism on Yahoo seems conventional wisdom. Yahoo was listed among “four dying companies” over three years ago, and the other three have essentially been carved up: Palm bought and essentially killed by HP, Sun swallowed up by Oracle for its patent portfolio, and AMD making a bold (i.e. risky) shift to a fabless/outsourcing model.

Meanwhile, the travails of RIM and HP have been well chronicled. All three companies are at a point — as Apple was in the mid-1990s — where their troubles are so great that they have trouble attracting a top tier CEO. In offering the most optimistic view of HP, Poletti sees CEO Meg Whitman as a savvy corporate politician and transitional figure, who sets the ship aright but then turns to the reins over to a technologist (possibly inside) leader.

This plays to a conjecture I’ve been trying to nail down for my book on engineering entrepreneurship: great technology companies have to be led by great technologists. (Steve Jobs might be an exception to this rule, but he was an exception to nearly every rule).

Still, these are companies that have hit a difficult time, having lost (or in the process of losing) their once certain moneymaking franchise to commoditization and other market turmoil created by creative destruction. As Prof. Christensen notes, this is the inevitable way of the technology-enabled world.

Strategy is choosing what not to do

Strategy is making trade-offs in competing. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, there would be no need for choice and thus no need for strategy.

— Michael Porter, “What is Strategy?”
Harvard Business Review, 1996

As an entrepreneur — with limited resources and a finite period of time before we ran out of money — this is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. It is something I emphasize in my consulting, in my business analysis and my teaching.

I don’t recall seeing the original Porter quote, but the version I normally use in class is

Choosing what to do means choosing what not to do.

Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to read Dilbert this morning. For at least a decade, I didn’t care for Scott Adams emphasizing the cynical over the insightful. But in lampooning the foolish overconfidence of the pointy head boss, he makes the point in a way that will stick with students far better than anything I’ve ever said in class.

Big pharma hasn't solved commoditization

Cross posted from Bio Business Blog.

Many reporters, analysts and other observers over the past decade have remarked on how the traditional big pharma business model has been running out of steam. Proposed solutions have included buying biotech companies (as Roche did) and forming generic divisions (as has Sanofi). Still, from outside, the (in)actions of big pharma resemble the controlled flight into terrain of other IP companies.

Last week, two consultants from Booz & Company published their own analysis of the problems in the Booz house journal, strategy+business.

Alex Kandybin and Vessela Genova deduced the strategic choices of 10 major pharma companies (Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi) through their acquisitions and divestitures from 2004-2010. Nine of the 10 have bet on biologics, five on OTC, four on generics and one (Sanofi) on animal health.

They draw an analogy to the choices of the computer industry:

Most industries go through periods of both deterministic and stochastic development. For instance, the computer industry in the 1960s and ’70s had all the characteristics of a deterministic process. IBM, Burroughs, Cray, and others pursued similar strategies, selling giant data processing machines known as main- frames. The personal computer changed the dynamics of the industry, triggering a turbulent stochastic period. It became impossible to predict where the computer industry was going, and in the early 1980s the incumbent players’ strategies diverged significantly.

This is, alas, an inaccurate revisionist view of the industry: in the 1980s, it was quite clear that the PC was democratizing computers and that standardized microprocessors enabled market entry and reduced margins.

More importantly, the computer industry of the 1970s has significant a priori heterogeneity: it was not for nothing that people referred to IBM and the Seven Dwarfs (or IBM and the BUNCH). Cray was in a very narrow and dangerous niche diametrically opposed to commoditization trends and desperately dependent on Cold War spending.

One place where the authors clearly have it right is that big pharma is fleeing from the highest margins in the life sciences (and among the highest margins anywhere) towards average or sub-average margins. The operating margins of pharmaceuticals is 29%, vs. 12% for generics, 8% for services and 2% for drug wholesaling.

This is utterly consistent with the 15-year-old observations of Clay Christensen: lower cost solutions eventually supplant higher cost solutions, destroying margins. Or, as my former colleagues Jason Dedrick and Ken Kraemer showed in their 1998 book, IBM’s shift from hardware to services dramatically grew revenues but cut margins.

What to do? The authors offer fairly generic (i.e. undifferentiated) advice: firms should embrace change, consider multiple scenarios, and assess the firm’s unique capabilities.

In the end, the old model of one-size-fits-all drug is breaking down. What will replace it? One prediction is personalized, genomic-based medicine. But even if that’s true, many uncertainties remain, including how quickly that future will get here and which part of the value chain will be the most unique and thus valuable.

Strategy straw men

It’s no secret that consultants, academics and other authors are prone to offering pat answers to complex problems, whether in managerial books, textbooks, HBR article or other managerial proscriptions.

(Mr.) Jo Whitehead of the Ashridge business school argues in an FT article Monday that strategy textbooks and strategy classes focus on superficial application of complex theories rather than sophisticated application of basic (and memorable) theories:

The root of the problem is that everyone wants to discuss something new and sexy – leaving the basics behind. Professors have to research frontier issues, which typically mean rather esoteric subjects such as collaborative strategy, stakeholder engagement or Web 2.0. Students want exciting cases and flashy new ideas.

While the direction that he advocates makes sense, there seems to be no evidence for the (mythical)) straw man strategy professor. Another argument

Advice needs to be given on how to make the best use of limited data

First, many MBA classes assume that managers will be working in a large corporation with unlimited resources — while entrepreneurship courses have traditionally been taught in this direction.

He adds:

Without such changes we will continue to churn out business people who can talk about the latest sexy concepts in strategy but, when required to come up with one, default to overly simplistic approaches such as Swot analysis.

Teaching basic application of key concepts to all levels of students was my major goal for 9 years of teaching strategy at SJSU, and most of my colleagues as well.

Another problem with the straw man was the broad brush argument. I've taught undergrads, 20-something MBA students, and executive MBAs. Undergraduates have to understand what a manager does, while an existing manager has to be sold that you have some clue as to what you’re talking about. An approach suitable for one audience is going to fall with another.

Finally, the article concluded with the obligatory plug:

Jo Whitehead is the author of ‘What you need to know about strategy’ (Capstone) and a director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre

It turns out, this is the second of his two strategy books for managers. Meanwhile, his bio notes his former role as VP and director of BCG (the people who brought us the infamous if now forgotten 2x2 “cash cow” framework).

So while I am sympathetic to Mr. Whitehead’s desire to improve strategy teaching and make it more realistic, I don’t think his complaint represents the typical business school (or at least the typical US teaching-oriented business school). Plus if one were to investigate where superfluous “new and sexy” theories come from, I’d be inclined to start with consultants, book authors and directors of b-school strategy centers.

HP's acts of desperation

Since last week’s huge news about HP I’ve been hoping to write something, but I was traveling and didn’t time to collect my thoughts. Even after five days, the news still doesn’t make sense, other than as the death throes (or at least mortally wounded throes) of a once-great giant.

Yes, HP has serious problems. It’s been unable to find a decent CEO since its founders (NB: Apple, Microsoft). Simultaneously chasing both Dell and IBM, it caught and passed Dell for a prize it no longer wants, while it seems unlikely to ever catch IBM (at least in my lifetime).

The HP board and CEO Léo Apotheker seem incapable of dealing with the current challenges. It has come to having HP’s chairman bad-mouthing Apotheker’s predecessor for “under-investment” in the core business.

But this is only the latest desperate effort in more than a decade of throwing one Hail Mary pass after another. Its $1.2b purchase of Palm and webOS was (as predicted) a major mistake. It allowed the (previously dying) Palm cellphone business to die, and meanwhile the efforts to establish the TouchPad as a viable iPad rival has failed miserably (much like RIM) with Best Buy selling less than 10% of those ordered and HP writing off $1 billion in losses on the webOS hardware business — most of that on the TouchPad.

Yes, a couple of things make sense from the announcements. Yes it’s time to cut the losses on the webOS acquisition (Perhaps claiming it has a future as a consumer embedded OS postpones the inevitable write-down, but competing against a no-royalty embedded Linux will be difficult at best.)

And at some level, the divorce of the low margin PC business from the potentially high margin software/services business has a business logic. Mark Hurd was the right man to run the commodity business while Apotheker prefers higher margin services, and neither was suited to run both together in a single company.

The problem is that the current HP is a conglomerate of the leading commodity PC maker, the leading (increasingly commoditized) printer maker, and a hodgepodge of largely second-tier software and services businesses.

Under Hurd, the company had embraced commoditization — executing on Carly’s Compaq acquisition and doing an exemplary job of competing in commodity markets. The only cost was the heart and soul of Bill and Dave’s company, ripping it out as the company shed workers, perks and the exemplary culture that once inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Then the HP board panicked over Hurd’s poor judgement and forced him out, replacing the successful commodity numbers weenie with just the opposite: a software guy that was presiding over the dying SAP franchise. Apotheker had not solved SAP’s problems — coasting on the inertia of its once-invincible lock-in rents in the BPR segment — so he was rewarded with the reins of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most storied company.

A completely different CEO meant a completely different strategy, which in turn requires a different portfolio of businesses. (It also requires different competencies up and down the line, which the latest moves pointedly do not address.)

Even if exiting PCs now makes sense, as others have noted HP has completely bungled the planned PC spinout. IBM’s decision to sell its division came as a bolt from the blue with the buyer already announced. Apparently HP shopped the PC business and didn’t get its desired price, so now the uncertainty around the PC division (the born-again Compaq) will cause it to hemorrhage customers and market value until it’s finally dumped.

In the end, I have to lay the current problems on the board, which brought us the infamous spying scandal, melodrama over the last 3 CEO appointments and of course forcing out its best directors, Tom Perkins (of Kleiner Perkins fame) and George Keyworth. As Perkins noted in a 2007 video and his memoir, the board groupthink forced out any dissenting view — which (to further mangle metaphors) is a recipe for marching lockstep over a cliff.

Who’s on the board? Two insiders, three private equity investors, a failed startup technologist turned investor (Mark Andreessen), a former consumer products exec (Meg Whitman), execs of two failing telecom companies, the CEO of a successful software lock-in business, CEO of a major consulting company, chairman of a specialty chemicals business, and Larry Elison’s longtime sidekick (turned nemesis and Kleiner Perkins managing partner).

Oddly, while the board has exemplary gender diversity it lacks the obligatory university professor or president. I suspect Intel benefitted greatly from the advice of longtime director David Yoffie — even if I didn’t always agree with his analysis. (If HP goes looking for an academic, Tim Bresnahan of Stanford has understood the economics of platform businesses longer than anyone.)

Apparently I’m not the only one fed up with the HP board. After the 20% drop in HP stock Friday, fellow Seeking Alpha contributor Vitaliy Katsenelson wrote:

Anger and frustration are the two emotions pulsing through my veins as I write this. HP (HPQ), once the symbol of innovation, is being dismantled by its high-pedigreed board and the CEO of the hour. … [In] the early 2000s, when Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, engineered the HP merger with Compaq. … [N]ine years and two CEOs later HP has announced that the PC business, the one it so desperately wanted just a decade ago, is too hard a business and that it will look for ways to get rid of it. Almost in the same breath HP announced that it will kill WebOS devices, a business it acquired in April 2010 for $1 billion; and management, possibly missing the irony in those two announcements, went ahead and announced another acquisition, which this time will for sure transform the company.
…
I don’t need to have a great imagination to envision another conference call in August 2015, where a new CEO decides that the software business is too difficult, and HP needs to come back to its roots (maybe going back to making calculators) and will spin off the software business into a new company, take an enormous charge, and then maybe announce an acquisition that the same highly pedigreed board will rubber-stamp.
…
HP’s stock sold off not because the company disappointed Wall Street but because Wall Street grew tired of the overpriced “must-have” acquisitions. Wall Street has smartened up and assumed that this acquisition, as with many other “transformative” acquisitions, will do nothing of the sort.

I’d like to hope that HP will turn around some day, but I can’t see how to get there from here. It would require an entirely new board, one with more winners than losers and more big company operating experience. HP and its board are too big to be threatened with a hostile takeover, and so will muddle along — acquiring baubles with the shareholders’ checkbook — without a coherent long-term strategy or market niche.

How not to do strategy

In the recent McKinsey Quarterly, Prof. Dick Rumelt of UCLA writes about how often he finds companies who confuse bad strategy with effective strategy.

One type of bad strategy is a stretch goal that cannot be achieved — as with this vivid example:

The reference to “pushing until we get there” triggered in my mind an association with the great pushes of 1915–17 during World War I, which led to the deaths of a generation of European youths.

Over the years, Rumelt has identified four hallmarks of bad strategy:

1. failing to face the problem
2. mistaking goals for strategy: i.e. you have hopes (for change) but no plan that will get you there
3. bad strategic objectives
4. fluff, i.e. “A final hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is superficial abstraction—a flurry of fluff—designed to mask the absence of thought. Fluff is a restatement of the obvious, combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords that masquerade as expertise.”

(Looking at this list, this applies to any form of leadership — business, nonprofit, military and especially political.)

One source of such bad strategy is, in Rumelt’s words, the “template-style system of strategic planning”:

The template looks like this:

The Vision. Fill in your vision of what the school/business/nation will be like in the future. Currently popular visions are to be the best or the leading or the best known.

The Mission. Fill in a high-sounding, politically correct statement of the purpose of the school/business/nation. Innovation, human progress, and sustainable solutions are popular elements of a mission statement.

The Values. Fill in a statement that describes the company’s values. Make sure they are noncontroversial. Key words include “integrity,” “respect,” and “excellence.”

The Strategies. Fill in some aspirations/goals but call them strategies. For example, “to invest in a portfolio of performance businesses that create value for our shareholders and growth for our customers.”

This template-style planning has been enthusiastically adopted by corporations, school boards, university presidents, and government agencies. Scan through such documents and you will find pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights. The enormous problem all this creates is that someone who actually wishes to conceive and implement an effective strategy is surrounded by empty rhetoric and bad examples.

For almost a decade, I’ve been trying to stamp out the template thinking in my students, because — like the companies they emulate — they regurgitate standard platitudes rather than think about what makes their company unique. I used to go to the Dilbert mission statement generator to make my point, but with it gone there are now several generators on the web that do the trick.

Another point I make with my students is that if the mission and values are to have meaning, then every employee (or at least every full-time employee) should be able to recite them from memory. A mission statement that covers everything means nothing.

Of course, this is easier said that done. At least twice I’ve been involved in exercises (with my own employer) that uses the template approach but have been unable to stop the drift — nay, stampede — toward platitudinous thinking. Perhaps with Dick Rumelt under my arm, next time I’ll have more luck.

Qualcomm: beyond the cellphone

Qualcomm has pulled the plug on FLO TV, its attempt at terrestrial broadcasting to cellphone (later dedicated device owners). It sold the spectrum to AT&T (so that LTE iPhones will have better Internet access than the 3G phones have today) and is refunding the purchase price paid by buyers.

I’m not sure what it means for Qualcomm’s future, but I offer some thoughts on my San Diego Telecom blog. Certainly it hurts its batting average under its second CEO, Paul Jacobs, son of the original CEO Irwin Jacobs.

On the other hand, Intel has been through multiple CEOs since its founding, and basically makes all its money from the 1980 decision to source IBM’s PC cpu and then later to pull out of DRAMs. So while Intel is un-sexy and no longer is seen as a growth company, it’s not in trouble, desperate or in danger of going away any time soon.

In some ways, it suggests second acts are very hard to pull off. Intel Microsoft and Motorola moved beyond their original products to another cash cow, but Oracle and SAP have not. (eBay may eventually make more money off of PayPal than auctions, so it’s too soon to call that one.) RCA and the original AT&T were once technological powerhouses that eventually died. Once-great pharma companies are also in great trouble nowadays.

Of tech companies, Apple and IBM have pulled off multiple re-inventions, but is there anyone else in that league? Google might get there someday, but they’re not there yet.

Even tech industries grow up someday

When I started the professor gig back in 1998, I had a smug sense of superiority: I’m a tech strategy guy, and I didn’t worry about the dinosaurs and dying industries and boring stable mature industries.

Since that time, we’ve had the dot-com crash, the NASDAQ crash, a decade of sideways tech stocks (some still below all-time peaks) and in general a mature, commoditized IT industry, including once-great companies like HP and onetime high growth companies like Oracle.

This is not just IT, but also the onetime epitome of high R&D/sales ratio and science-based differentiation, i.e. big pharma. Reflecting declining returns to R&D, big pharma has underperformed the S&P 500 for 15 years — even before the dot-com crash — and has responded by budget cuts, layoffs and offshoring.

In other words, all industries grow up someday. Light bulbs and transistors and telegraph wire were once cutting-edge too. Masked (slightly) by mergers and acquisitions, companies like Oracle and SAP lost the ability for organic growth almost a decade ago. Today the tech products — like PCs or phones or tablets (or proprietary pharmaceuticals or PV panels) have to worry about cost-based competition and the perennial threat of substitutes.

Given that, I’m now convinced that every would-be high-tech MBA needs at least a half-semester (or one-quarter) course on strategic marketing in mature consumer industries. We have a lot to learn from selling autos and soap and sugar water — despite what Steve Jobs said about selling sugar water almost 30 years ago.

Yes, we’d like to think (thanks to Moore’s Law) we’re not peddling tail fins but instead an ongoing stream of incremental improvements. Still, well-run companies in mature industries have a lot to teach us about product proliferation, cost engineering, consolidation, and buying/selling companies, not to mention maintaining and leverage brand equity in the face of commoditization.

In fact, I just got through reading final exams about soft drinks in the late 20th century. From 1975-1995, the two major cola companies squeezed out the smaller companies as they grew their share from 45% to 73%. (Does anyone remember drinking 7-Up? Of being able to buy it in a restaurant or on a plane? I do.) This growth occurred as they also grew the pie, with per capita soft drink consumption almost doubling during this same period.

Sure, New Coke is right up there with the PC Jr. (what?) or Lisa, Apple /// and Newton (huh?) as great marketing flops. Still, while all the growth this century will come from developing markets, both KO and PEP stretched their run out for another decade through a variety of product, marketing, supply chain and corporate-level strategies. The US auto makers haven’t done so well — Ford better than most — but the Europeans and Japanese have coped well with a maturing market.

Of course, high-tech marketing people need to learn how to do real consumer marketing. Intel and Qualcomm have grown their own, while Apple’s top marketing execs came from Macromedia (a software company) and Target. (The difference between Jobs I and Jobs II was the intervening experience building a consumer brand at Pixar.)

Ideally, the course on strategic marketing would be combined with a course on consumer marketing. However, the reality is that at most business schools, these are two separate skill sets not found in the same person.

Once upon a time business strategists studied Sun Tzu or Civil War battles. In the 21st century, they should study the cola wars, diversification efforts by the Japanese auto makers, franchising by Ray Kroc, the re-invention of water and coffee, and the branding of generic acetaminophen and ibuprofen.