...Question 1 Communication across Computime is lacking. According to Wolcott and Lippitz, Computime lacks formal communication channels between Research and Development (R&D) and business unit engineers (2008). If the R&D unit is unaware of how Computime’s customers are innovating a product, how can the department anticipate needs and make adjustments prior to unveiling a new product? Communication needs addressed. Chinese engineers “tend to be less accustomed to sharing problems, offering ideas, and working in teams” (Wolcott & Lippitz, 2008). This is a barrier for Computime, as Chinese engineers may not be able to communicate effectively with the R&D units. To improve communication channels, Computime can use Frans Johnansson’s concept of making barriers fall, by embracing a range of cultures (2004). Computime can hire engineers who are familiar with the Chinese culture and have experience with Chinese workers. By hiring people who know best how to work with the Chinese, communication can improve. Through improved communication, employees will be able to share ideas about customers’ needs and further anticipate future products. Computime will need to create a sense of urgency regarding the importance of improved communication (Kotter, 2002). To create a sense of urgency, Computime will show videotapes of angry customers to employees. Hearing and seeing customer frustrations will help employees better understand the need for improved communication (Kotter, 2002). In order...
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...than customers’ needs, create a “marketing myopia” resulting in business nearsightedness or shortsightedness. The most important question is therefore, “What business are we really in?” from the perspective of what customer want. What do people really want when they acquire a product or a service? This question directly impacts the strategy and the value proposition definition Companies need to understand the difference between a product and a commodity: • A product is what customer feels about your business • A commodity is anything for which there is a demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market Kodak is a great example in which marketing myopia was present. The digital camera was invented at Kodak in 1975. But instead of marketing the new technology, the company kept it under wraps for fear of hurting its lucrative film business. And when Kodak decided to get in the game it was too late. Kodak had the myopic view that the company was in the film business rather than the story telling business. But customers aren’t buying cameras and film as much as they are buying a record of their memories. Kodak therefore misdefined the business they were in: instead of focusing on the product: capturing stories, they hooked on the commodity: selling film. Marketing Myopia is the title of an important marketing paper written by Theodore Levitt and published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review • ◦ #Kodak ◦ #Marketing ◦ #Innovation • 1 year ago • 10 • Permalink...
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...Leadership Reflection This paper reflects on the following questions: What do you think is your passion? Why do you say this is your passion, as it may be manifested in your personality, personal history and lineage? --- As I was reflecting on this intently, I came across this online article from Harvard Business Review where Peter Drucker, one of the most influential people in the area of modern management, talked about the topic on managing oneself. And an excerpt from this article below quite interests me the most. “Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at—and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.” - by Peter F. Drucker, Harvard Business Review: “Managing Oneself”; http://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself/ar/1 This struck me quite a bit as I found this a bit ironic, because this somehow describes how things are unravelling, particularly on the state of my profession right now, and the state of things, in general. Well, I am not quite sure what I’m really good at. It’s not like I’m inept. It’s just that I am not sure if I’m really good at something. I’ve always engaged myself with so many things back then as my personal history reveals, as “jack of all trades, master of none” identity. For example, I have passion for creating...
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...Introduction This review is about the article ‘Sustainability in the Boardroom’, written by: Lynn S. Paine. Lynn S. Paine is a John G. Mclean Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean for faculty development at Harvard Business School and also the coauthor of Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business and the author several other Harvard Business Review articles. The article, published by Harvard Business Review in 2014, includes 9 pages. Vol. 92, Issue 7/8. A committee dedicated solely to corporate responsibility or sustainability is a useful addition to many, if not most boards in at least five ways: as a source of knowledge and expertise, as a sounding board and constructive critic, as a driver of accountability, as a stimulus for innovation, and as resource for the full board. No more than 10% of U.S. public company boards have a committee such as Nike has. The committee has proven to be a successful addition for Nike. In this article it will be explained why the committee has been successful by looking at how the corporate responsibility committee has served each of these functions. The five ways are stated in the one-sentence summary. Conwell had set up the committee board at Nike using her knowledge and expertise. The committee board has been founded with a reason. Committee board has to address the risks and opportunities arising from problems such as climate change, water pollution, corruption and uneven access to wealth, health...
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...Oct. 24 2014 Yinan Wang (Nancy) Title: Marketing Myopia Author: Theodore Levitt Year: 2004 Source: Levitt, T. (2004) Marketing Myopia, Harvard Business Review, Jul-Aug, pp138-149; originally published in Harvard Business Review, July/Aug. 1960, pp. 45-56. Insight：Interesting Readability: a little hard to read Relevance: good practice Overall: 7.5 Key Content: The article focus on trade will get successful when they cater for customers’ demands rather than selling their products for clients. The effective corporate management is very essential for development of companies. Some firms’ business stopped growing because of failing business management, such as incorrect business orientation and purposes, concrete matters. The article showed that petroleum industry makes its business get success because improved manufacture oil product’s efficiency, products innovation and gas and oil transmission, in particular, developed domestic central-heating system to compete with rivalry. Also pointed that the car industry’s ford company through saving its product costs to reduce its cars price to meet more customers’ demands to purchase its cars and increase industry profits. Therefore, for pursuing enterprise business success, corporations must pay attention to customer creating and customer-satisfy organism through a powerful leadership. Learning / Reflection: In the article, successful company leader utilize marketing...
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...terms Search Results 1. Jamie Turner Case - Essays - Yayayaa www.termpaperwarehouse.com › Business and Management o Cached o Similar May 4, 2014 - Read this essay on Jamie Turner Case . Come browse ... Case 2: Jamie Turner at MLI, Inc ... How did Turner get himself into this predicament? 2. Jamie Turner_百度文库 wenku.baidu.com/view/4695dfcf5fbfc77da269b186.html o Cached o Similar Nov 30, 2012 - Problem Statement Jamie Turner joined the MLI Company as vice ... Analysis In the case, there are five major conflicts between Jamie and ... 3. [PDF]“Jamie Turner at MLI, Inc.” Discussion Questions - Timothy A ... www.timothy-judge.com/.../JamieTurnerDiscussionQuestions3.pdf o Cached o Similar How much of Jamie Turner's predicament would you attribute to mistakes he made? 3. ... How should Turner approach Cardullo at the end of the case? 5. 4. Jamie Turner at MLI, Inc. - Case - Harvard Business School www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41781 o Cached o Similar The case describes the evolution of an interpersonal mismatch between a previously successful manager, Jamie Turner, and his new boss, Pat Cardullo. Turner ... 5. Jamie Turner at MLI, Inc. - Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/product/jamie-turner-at-mli-inc/4254-PDF-ENG o Cached...
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...on an outcome without a time deadline. According to Drucker (2003) successful innovators use both the left and right side of the brain when generating ideas or problem solving. Once the innovative idea has been developed they will then turn their attention to the potential users and analyse their expectations and needs. This analysis creates constraints, other constraints as pointed out by Mayer (2006) include resourcing and time. Kanter (2006) believes that a common leadership mistake is to “strangle innovation with tight controls” (Kanter, 2006 p79). The article goes on to add that a remedy for this is to add flexibility to planning and control systems as well as surrounding innovators with a supportive culture of collaboration. A business needs to find a balance between creating an environment that fosters creativity whilst having the suitable constraints that enable the focus...
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...a lecturer in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; now, he is a full-fledged professor. The Harvard Business Review has sold more than half a million reprints of this article and each reprint has no doubt been copied several times over. There will be few marketing students who have not read this article which is about how an organization can guarantee its sustained growth a big question? To quote from the summing up of this article, Marketing Myopia answered that question mark in a new demanding way by urging organizations to define their business broadly to take privilege of development opportunities. Using the example of the railroads, Levitt showed how they declined as technology highly developed since they define themselves too narrowly. To continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on their customers' needs and desires, and not bank on the presumptive longevity of their products. Even more dramatic is the first paragraph of this seminal article which reads: “Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others which are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case the reason for growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated; it is because there has been a failure of management”. Well I am with Levitt, those companies who have not defined there business or had defined...
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...What is the purpose of business? Discuss. INTRODUCTION 1 At a dinner party a doctor, a lawyer and a businessman are sitting around the table chatting and talking about their life and work. At one point another man approaches the table and asks the three men what the purpose of their jobs is. The doctor immediately responds that he wants to help people and save life. The lawyer takes over and says he fights for justice and equality but when it comes to the businessman to answer the question - he remains silent. Would a normal businessman have been able to give readily a precise answer as to the purpose of business? Would he have said is it all about money and making profit? Or would he have answered like Peter Drucker that the customer should have the highest priority in business life and everything should be done to satisfy him1. Or would he have responded like Dave Packard once said: “I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being...” 2 These quotes describe very well the difficulty in answering the question what the purpose of business is and the need for detailed analysis. As everybody is affected and surrounded by business every day, and since one can hardly imagine a world without business, it is crucial to know its purpose. Therefore it is the objective of this paper to examine in greater detail the nature and purpose...
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...In 1993 the American iconic company IBM hired a new turnaround CEO named Lou Gerstner. In this Harvard Business Review article entitled Diversity as Strategy, Harvard Professor David A. Thomas writes about an aspect of Gerstner’s strategy is really a story about people, starting with the diversity of people within IBM, and the positive replication into their global markets. These markets include customers, employees, and the search for new talent to recruit. Gerstner realized that an organization the size of IBM must embrace diversity, to not only influence people, but as a strategy to open the doors to new opportunities both internally and externally. Gerstner launched a Diversity Task Force initiative with the goal, “to uncover and understand the differences among the groups and find ways to appeal to a broader set of employees and customers” (Thomas, 2004. Pg. 1). Gerstner explained that it was more than just about the talent pool, and that it was a market based issue. Realizing the diversity in the markets, and IBM’s need to expand in the markets, would require the people representing IBM to be as diverse and multi-culture oriented as the markets. The first usable takeaway from the articles emphasis on culture change is the idea of Constructive Disruption. It’s an interesting approach to how IBM, and most employers really, approached employee management issues. Companies had become very careful at not distinguishing differences among groups of diversity to remove...
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...Marketing Myopia, Journal Article 1 Sylvia DeSormeau Marketing Management, MKT 308 Rob Koonce, Instructor May 1, 2009 "Marketing Myopia" is an article published in the Harvard Business Review originally in 1960. The very fact that it is still being used as a teaching tool in a marketing class in 2009 speaks volumes for the article's central message, that top executives must define their industries correctly. It seems simple enough, and yet Levitt supplies the reader with many examples of industries that have either given up profitable opportunities or simply drowned in a sea of red due to their industry classification. Industry classification errors do not occur because top management believes that it operates in a different field than it actually does, per se. Rather, Levitt drives home the point that most successful companies identify themselves to be a part of larger industries. This concept is at the heart of Levitt's article. Rather than defining one's industry to be "the street car industry" or "the railroad industry," companies would be much more successful if they thought of themselves as being in "the transportation industry." After all, most of the time technology evolves but the needs to be fulfilled remain the same. Another cause of marketing myopia is what Levitt calls the "idea of indispensability." This concept is embodied by many industries, including the petroleum industry. For instance, Levitt speaks of the gas revolution that posed a threat on the...
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...HW ASSIGMENT #2 The topic is selected for my weekly assignment is ‘Managing Oneself’. It’s also the title of an article Peter Drucker wrote on Harvard Business Review in 1999. I found it very useful either for the topics we discussed in class during these past two weeks and for my career, both as a student and as a business person. In the article, Drucker focuses the attention on 5 specific, but at the same time broad, questions: ‘What are my strengths?’, ‘How do I work?’, ‘What are my values?’, ‘Where do I belong?’, ‘What can I contribute?’. Reading Drucker’s words, I was most impressed by the second one: ‘How do I work?’, or ‘How do I perform?’. I believe self-consciousness is a fundamental starting point in a successful managerial career: you have to be one hundred percent aware under what circumstances you work best and where your weaknesses may come to surface. One individual has to know his limits as well as his strengths. Every person is different from each other and know yourself as much as possible will only turn out to be helpful and beneficial when working in group. Companies are now becoming more and more team-oriented than they were in the past and interactions with others occur on a daily basis. Only if you know yourself you will be able to know others. I believe this is true even as a business student: work-groups happen regularly and you are expected to perform well even if you are not inside a decision room on the top floor of a company building. It has...
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...| 2012 | | OUR LADY OF THE LAKE UNIVERSITY David R Hurtado | NIKE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA | | Nike in Southeast Asia Is it ethical for a company to move its manufacturing jobs from country to country looking for the best price to pay for its product? Can Nike afford to ignore the five forces outlined by Harvard University professor Michael Porter? No they can’t! If they do, they will end up like all those before them that have, closed! Before we take a look at why Nike is such a “Bad Guy,” let’s take a look at the American worker. For many decades now, they have been complaining about the loss of jobs and the lack thereof and blame large corporations for this. The fact of the matter is, the American worker has been pricing themselves right out of the job market for decades now. Nike is doing nothing different than its consumers do when they go from store to store or website to website trying to find the very best deal that they can. Why does the consumer act in this manner? Well I can tell you for me it is to keep as much of my money in my pocket at the same time getting what I want from the store. So why it is then, when corporations like Nike moves its jobs around the world trying to get the best price it can, get chastised for the very behavior that we as consumers partake in every day? I am not too sure of this but it might be because of our self-righteous-judgmental nature. The truth is Nike doesn’t employ the people in these so called sweat shops in Southeast...
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...Chesbrough and David J. Teece Creativity Is Not Enough Theodore Levitt r0208k In Closing Stumbling into Brilliance Danny Hillis r0208l BEST OF HBR 1985 The Discipline of Innovation by Peter F Drucker . How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? If it’s mainly the former, then management’s role is limited: Hire the right people, and get out of their way. If it’s largely the latter, management must play a more vigorous role: Establish the right roles and processes, set clear goals and relevant measures, and review progress at every step. Peter Drucker, with the masterly subtlety that is his trademark, comes down somewhere in the middle. Yes, he writes in this article, innovation is real work, and it can and should be managed like any other corporate function. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same as other business activities. Indeed, innovation is the work of knowing rather than doing. Drucker argues that most innovative business ideas come from methodically analyzing seven areas of opportunity, some of which lie within particular companies or industries and some of which lie in broader social or demographic trends. Astute managers will ensure that their organizations maintain a...
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...The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value Rethinking Capitalism by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer January–February 2011 ‐ http://hbr.org/2011/01/the‐big‐idea‐creating‐shared‐value/ar/pr What Is “Creating Shared Value”? - Policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. The concept of shared value—which focuses on the connections between societal and economic progress— has the power to unleash the next wave of global growth. An increasing number of companies known for their hard‐nosed approach to business—such as Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Unilever, and Wal‐Mart—have begun to embark on important shared value initiatives. But our understanding of the potential of shared value is just beginning. There are three key ways that companies can create shared value opportunities: • By reconceiving products and markets • By redefining productivity in the value chain • By enabling local cluster development Every firm should look at decisions and opportunities through the lens of shared value. This will lead to new approaches that generate greater innovation and growth for companies—and also greater benefits for society. Creating Shared Value & ‘Developing countries’ - Solving social problems has been ceded to governments and to NGOs. Corporate responsibilities programs—a reaction to external p...
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