After their death, people’s reputations begin to eclipse the real facts of their lives. ‘Steve Jobs fired as Apple chairman’ and ‘Steve Jobs strikes pragmatic deal with Microsoft’ are not the sort of sub-heads you find in most of the obituaries.
Apple versus Microsoft
Steve Jobs was the genius who founded Apple Inc, the quirky, creative corporation [...]
In an earlier blog Greg Dyke and John Birt: lessons in leadership I explored the dramatic difference in leadership style between two previous Director Generals of the BBC: John Birt, and his successor, Greg Dyke.
I used this case history recently in a morning session on leadership development at Oxford Saïd Business School, and it reminded [...]
In my blog ‘Gerstner and the IBM turnaround: vision or execution’, I wrote about the life-threatening hole that IBM had got itself into by the early 1990s, before Louis Gerstner was persuaded to take up one of the most challenging Chief Executive roles in the history of the modern corporation, and about how Gerstner rather [...]
A version of this article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Strategy magazine, with the title What lies beneath?
Several leading modern business leaders seem, surprisingly, to downplay the importance of strategy. You can make too much fuss about strategy, they imply—you have a few clear options; just choose one and get on with it.
Is it [...]
‘Command and Control’ is a phrase that we only use nowadays in connection with modern management in a tone of amused irony. We all know about command and control as the management system of choice from the earliest days of the major modern corporations—and we have definitely ‘moved on’.
Or have we?
Command and control systems used [...]
The broadcasting lives of John Birt and Greg Dyke were surprisingly interwoven. When Dyke joined LWT (London Weekend Television) as a reporter in 1977, Birt was head of Current Affairs and Features. When Dyke was persuaded to move to the new (and struggling) breakfast television franchise TV-am as Editor-in-Chief, John Birt—by then Director of Programmes [...]
When he arrived at IBM , Gerstner said to a press conference in July 1993, after his first 100 days, ‘There’s been a lot of speculation as to when I’m going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I’d like to say to all of you is that the last thing IBM needs right [...]
Carly Fiorina and the HP Compaq merger
In September 2001, Hewlett Packard’s gutsy new CEO, Carly Fiorina – ‘the most powerful woman in business,’ according to Fortune magazine in 1998 – announced the acquisition by Hewlett Packard of the major PC manufacturer, Compaq. This was the biggest merger that the IT industry had yet seen. Compaq [...]
Carly Fiorina was employed as the CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP) in July 1999. She drove through a programme of change in the face of what she saw as a company that had taken Bill Hewlett’s and David Packard’s philosophy of devolving decision-making as far as possible to the level nearest to the consumer and, [...]
Jack Welch was, of course, CEO of America’s General Electric corporation (GE) for twenty years, from 1981 to 2001. During his tenure, the market capitalisation of GE rose from $14 billion to $410 billion, making GE the most valuable company in the world. That’s why you hear a lot about Jack Welch.
One of the best [...]
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