Tag Archives: Apple

Do Big Tech Companies Become Too Big Not to Fail?

Business Stories, Business Strategy, , , , , , , ,

culture-eats-strategyI caught this one yesterday on Medium: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. It’s by Dare Obasanjo on Hacker Daily (great title, by the way). It’s a well-thought-out discussion of how Google and Facebook culture achieved a substantial shift of strategy in a way that others (Blockbuster facing Netflix, and Blackberry facing iPhone) couldn’t. Here’s the summary.

“when your strategy changes then your entire organizational culture will have to change as well. Your organizational culture is defined by what positive behaviors you encourage and what negative behaviors you tolerate. Blackberry couldn’t compete with Apple when teams were still motivated & rewarded for keeping corporate CIOs happy and there was no way Blockbuster could compete with Netflix when they fundamentally saw themselves as a classic retail video rental store and ignored the power of online experiences.”

That’s a good read. Dare collected details and presents them very well. There are some stories of interest there.

And it challenges an assumption that I’ve made for decades now, which is that large businesses are doomed to fail eventually because they become like big ships, unable to turn quickly, unable to react. I’ve seen IBM fall from the “Big Blue” industry giant of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to another also-ran today (no offense, IBM). I’ve seen Microsoft fall from the king of the world in the middle-to-late 1990s to struggling to keep up today.

It seems so hard for big tech companies to sustain growth rates when sales run into the billions. Although this post argues against it, I would have thought that Google, Apple, and Facebook will eventually slow down because they are so big. But maybe not.

I’ve never been an employee of a big (thousands of employees, maybe tens of thousands) company but I’ve deal with them as consulting clients. What I thought I saw was that as they grew, middle managers and office politics took over, regardless of what top management wanted. Decision making slowed to a crawl, and the friction through the chains of management became impossible. The culture changed in ways top management couldn’t prevent. Go to an exciting startup and people are working at all hours. Go to a big company and they left at five. Or so it seemed to me.

Can Google, Apple, or Facebook buck that history? Are big tech companies doomed to decline. Live by tech, die by tech? Do they become too big not to fail?

The Best Business Success Factor is Value

Business Stories, Business Strategy, , , , , , ,

Keys to entrepreneurial success? We talk about passion, persistence, ideas, funding, planning, sales, product-market fit, and all of that. Do what you love, we say. My opinion changes according to recent events, experience, even mood. Which is fine, because it’s a reaction to events, and we don’t want to get static. But on the long term, most often, what I see making the most difference in business is value. Offer value to customers.

You can do what you love, and if nobody wants to pay you, you don’t have a business. Nobody’s going to pay me to play my guitar, or draw, or ski. I have to think of something I like to do that other people will pay for. So I ended up with business planning. Maybe they’ll pay you to play your guitar. And if you like skiing, maybe you end up as a ski teacher, or you own a resort, or you do ski movies. And maybe they will pay you to draw, if you’re a graphic artist.

And then you give value. It’s not about you and what you want. It’s about them, your customers, and what they want.

I realize it’s a bit out of date, a 1987 book, but Paul Hawken‘s Growing a Business is still my favorite business book.  Growing_a_business It’s the first one I recommend.

Hawken tells real stories of real businesses wrapped around people doing what they like because they like doing it, they think it should be done, and the doing of it flows simply into the logic of filling needs and offering value. Two guys in Vermont get involved with their ice cream. They start selling it. It ends up being Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. It’s a great story.

They aren’t all bearded ex hippies. The stories include a bank in Palo Alto, Patagonia (outdoor clothes), Apple computer, etc. What they have in common is a sense of organic, natural growth from the foundations of doing what you want to do, when that’s something that other people want to have done. And they offered value to their customers.

It helped for me that I was a customer of the bank in Palo Alto, and of Ben and Jerry’s, Patagonia, and Apple Computer, and my wife loved buying at Smith and Hawken. I believe in the underlying idea that businesses depend on value — value to the customer — and values — the people in the business have to believe in it.

The business in this book isn’t what you learn in business school. It’s what you want to do. It isn’t about building a business to make money, but rather building a business because it should be built and you want to do it. With that kind of foundation, it seems — and I’ve seen for years now, with hundreds of different business — it grows.

ps: I shared the podium with Paul Hawken in the late 1980s, at Apple, when I was speaking on business planning and he was speaking about the ideas behind this book. He seemed a man whose persona was based on ideas, on the underlying values. I’m not surprised at the way his career has gone since.

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Business Landscapes Change. Giants Fade.

Business Stories, Business Strategy, Web/Tech, , , , ,

Quick thought for the day: business landscapes change.  Giants fall. Startups become giants.

The giant, the big power, that everybody fears, and by whom everybody wants to be acquired … it’s Google these days. It used to be Microsoft. Are you familiar with Lotus 1-2-3? There was a time when Lotus was the giant of software. And Vision? Look it up: it was the world’s largest personal computer software company in 1983.

Giants are hated and feared. 

In January 1985 Apple released the now-famous 1984 commercial that pitted the high-tech newbie against the industry giant (here’s a link to it on (ironically) Google video)  … and although it’s hard to believe now, back then that was all about IBM and everybody knew that instantly. Today it’s total anachronism. But IBM was the giant of the industry for about 20 years. It was hated and feared. They called it Big Blue.

So now it’s Google.  What do you think: For how long? Who’s next? 

5 Ways to Tell You’re Too Corporate for Entrepreneurship

Business Mistakes, Leadership, Management, , , , ,

I was reading Should We Worry About Older Entrepreneurs? from Small Business Trends the other day when I stumbled upon this intriguing quote:

Field also worries that entrepreneurship might not be right for older Americans because these folks have spent too much time in the corporate world.

corporate towersHmmm … a bit of a generalization, no?

In honor of that thought, with a tip of the hat to comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” routine, here’s my list of ways (none of them age related) you can tell that you just might be too corporate:

  1. If, when you see $850 or $1,450 in the budget, you assume that means $850,000 and $1.45 million (you ask: the numbers are in thousands, right?), then you might be too corporate for entrepreneurship.
  2. If every time you encounter something that has to be done, you look immediately for staff people to assign it to, then you might be too corporate for entrepreneurship.
  3. If you measure yourself and everybody else by office or cubicle size and layout, then you might be too corporate for entrepreneurship.
  4. If problems are to be ducked, and monkeys to be passed on to somebody else, then you might be too corporate for entrepreneurship.
  5. If having a reason why not is the same as getting something done, then you might be too corporate for entrepreneurship.

But just age? Age might make a person too old, but not too corporate.

(Image: Fisherss/Shutterstock)

eBooks: Hot, Flat, Crowded, and Not on Amazon.com. Let the Games Begin

Books, Business Stories, Business Strategy, , , , ,

(Important: late-breaking news. Since this was posted earlier today, Amazon has reversed its position on this. Macmillan is back, but with its own pricing on the Kindle. This is important. Here’s a link.)

eBook wars, you say? On one hand, it’s about time. On the other, wow, this is strategy in action. And interesting spectacle too. That’s why in athletics the championship games are more interesting: two big winners squaring off.

Mashable led over the weekend with Apple vs. Amazon: The Great Ebook War Has Already Begun, a post by Ben Parr, whose work I like a lot. Posted Saturday, it’s about Amazon and Macmillan. It’s hard to tell who’s making the move on whom here, but the announcement was that Amazon.com was removing Macmillan books from its web store:

According to the New York Times, the reason the books were pulled was the iPad. Macmillan told Amazon that it wanted to change its pricing and compensation agreement, upping the price of some books from $9.99 to $15 and splitting sales 70/30, the same model Apple uses for the iPhone app store and its upcoming iBooks store. Amazon’s apparent response was to flex its muscle and pull countless Macmillan books off the virtual shelves.

Last Friday I posted how the competition is win-win for all sides. We get a choice: Kindle books, just text, for one price, or Apple iBook books (pizazz) for a higher price. You get to decide. Ah, the magic of commerce.

But with Amazon.com and Macmillan biting off each other’s noses, it’s not so clear. Ben Parr wrote:

That’s why Amazon decided to use its biggest weapon, Amazon.com itself, against Macmillan to send a message to every publisher: If you don’t play by its rules, then you can’t be in its store. While a publisher can likely survive without the Kindle, the same cannot be said for Amazon.com. Publishers simply cannot afford to leave the world’s largest online retailer.

Who wins? In this case, the losers are Amazon.com and Macmillan, and all Macmillan authors, and anybody who wants to buy their books. Amazon? Don’t we all go there because we can find all the books imaginable there? And now we don’t? Although you can still buy Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded on Amazon.com, you can’t do it directly. They list it as available from third-party sellers, even though it’s one of the most important books of the last year. And here’s some irony: Priceless, William Poundstone’s analysis of free and fair value and all, is another victim.

Remember the old days, when things like this were about giving customers what they want?

I Love Today’s iPhone Upgrade

Web/Tech,

Very much better late than never. The iPhone software upgrade released today added a GPS-like location feature to the iPhone’s Google maps implementation, instantly turning a weakness into a real strength. I love it.

It isn’t a real GPS. It uses triangulation from cellphone towers. It won’t show you moving on the map as you move in real time. What it will do, though, is show you were you are. Push a button, and the map application centers on wherever you are. 

I imagine it won’t work when you’re away from cellphone towers. And it doesn’t follow you around. But wow, what a nice improvement.

I loved the iPhone already, but I missed the GPS feature. Now it’s there for me, or close enough; and it doesn’t mean carrying around an additional GPS receiver. It’s on the phone.

And here’s an interesting side note, from a confessed iPhone lover. I also love GPS. I’ve carried a portable Garmin GPS with me on trips, and discovered, to my disappointment, that while walking in cities it frequently gives up on me because it can’t find the satellites. Buildings block its access. So maybe the iPhone is better in that respect. I tend to need map assistance more in the cities than on open highways.

The new update has some other interesting features, including customizable home page buttons, and movie rentals through iTunes, and new compatibility with some limited custom applications.

So it’s been nearly six months now. I bought the iPhone the first day, I was one of those who paid $600 for it, which became $500. I really like this phone. In all the initial analysis, many reviewers analyzed the features in detail without spending enough time on the simple ease of use. It searches maps for phone numbers, it gets and sends my standard email, it lets me manage voice mails one at a time and not necessarily sequentially, it’s very easy to find information and push with my fingers. It’s a really nice gadget. I’m very happy with this phone.