Custom Search

Bill Gates: An American Business Magnate, Philanthropist, Author and Chairman of Microsoft

Bill Gates is an outstanding example of another sort of guru, the guru who preaches more by deeds than by words. He revels in change and draws inspiration from a crisis.

His first book, 'The Road Ahead', was published in 1995. Gates famously ignored the Internet at first. The Internet and its implications dominate his second book, 'Business @ the Speed of Thought'.

But we can learn as much from Bill Gates by looking at what he does, as a manager and a leader, than by reading his books:


1. Concentrate your effort on a market with large potential but relatively few competitors
2. Get in early and big
3. Establish a proprietary position
4. Protect that position in every way possible
5. Aim for high gross margin
6. Make the customers an offer they can't refuse

Gates, with no previous experience, no MBA, and no mentors, set about creating a new sort of organization, what he called a knowledge company. The knowledge company's raw material is brainpower.

Vital to a knowledge company is what Gates calls the DNS - the Digital Nervous System, the e-mails and computer systems that allow everyone to learn everything they need to know.

Microsoft also has some very clear people policies, which give the company its extraordinary vitality. Gates summarizes them as five 'E's:

Enrichment
Empowerment
Emphasis on Performance
Egalitarianism
E-Mail

Biography:

Bill Gates doesn't teach at any university - in fact he left without ever completing his first degree. He doesn't join the lecture circuit nor is he a prolific author. He has only ever written two books and very few articles.

He got hooked on primitive computers at an early age, along with his friend Paul Allen. Then he and Paul stumbled across an advert for a small kit computer called the Altair 8800 and they started to write a programme for it, dreaming about what it would mean if everyone had their own affordable and easy-to-use computer.

Bill left his degree programme at Harvard to try to live that dream and between them, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created the world's first microcomputer software company. They called it Microsoft. It was 1975 and the world was about to change.

The US Government's anti trust action against Microsoft that started in 1998 confronted Gates with something new for him - unpopularity.

He has responded by giving up day-to-day control of his firm and giving more of his attention to the gigantic charitable foundation that he and his wife Melinda have set up. As he has said, when children are dying and starving in parts of the world, easier internet access seems almost beside the point.

Bibliography:
Road Ahead, 1995
Business @ the Speed of Thought : Using a Digital Nervous System, 1999
Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime

Source
Labels: , , , ,

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: A Tenured Professor in Business at Harvard Business School

Rosabeth goes into leading-edge corporations, learns from them and then serves up what she's learnt in nicely digestible messages for the rest of us.

Her early work looked at the communes of the 1960's and the social movement that brought them into existence, and the book she wrote about it, called "The Men and Women of the Corporation", had a big impact.

The new model organization, she notes, is lean, flat and athletic, rather than tall and authoritarian.

It's the job of the people at the top, Kanter says, to set the goals and values of the corporation, below them the middle layers design and manage the programmes and the systems, the forums and relationships that bind the whole together, while the project ideas and innovations hopefully bubble up from the bottom layers.

Her latest book e-Volve, draws together the best ideas of the best companies. The Internet, she says, could produce a great leap forward to a shared consciousness around the world and connect peoples everywhere. The best businesses in the digital world, she says, will be those that foster community internally and serve communities externally.

Rosabeth, of course, ends with a list of the qualities needed by business managers if they are to succeed in the new world of digital commerce:

- curiosity and imagination
- good communication skills, near and far
- cosmopolitan mindset, not confined to a single world view
- grasping complexity, finding the connections
- caring about feeding peoples' bodies and spirits

Biography:

Rosabeth Moss Kanter was once listed by the London Times newspaper as one of the fifty most powerful women in the world. Yet she commands nothing except ideas.

Not yet sixty, Kanter has been writing books of great insight for a long time, and the latest one may be her best yet. It is called 'e-Volve!'.

She is a sociologist by training and it shows. She looks at organizations as communities and cultures. Professor Kanter's current research is on the development of new leadership for the digital age.

She also runs a successful consultancy business, Goodmeasure Inc., whose consulting clients include some of the world's most prominent companies. Goodmeasure is currently developing Web-based versions of Kanter's leadership and change tools, to help embed them in the daily work of organizations everywhere.

Bibliography:

Labels: , , , ,

Fons Trompenaar and Charles Hampden Turner

For twenty years these two academics, a cross-cultural Anglo-Dutch partnership, have been interviewing managers around the world, giving them questionnaires to answer, conducting seminars and advising their companies.

Fons Trompenaar
Most of the management theory we know about has come from the Anglo-American culture, the one that most of these gurus belong to. This is a universalist culture, one that assumes that the rules that work for it will work universally. That might be a dangerous illusion. After all, we know that things work quite differently but equally well in other parts of the world.

Trompenaars and Hampden Turner discovered that North Americans and North Europeans were almost totally universalist in their responses. They would put the law first. Only 70 per cent of the French and the Japanese would do so, however, while, in Venezuela, two thirds would be particularist in their response.

Universalist countries take contracts very seriously and they employ lots of lawyers to make sure that the contract is kept. Particularist countries think that the relationship is more important than the contract and that a good deal requires no written contract - the particular people and the particular situation matter more than the universal rules.

Charles Hampden Turner
Trompenaars and Hampden Turner have detailed their conclusions in a string of books, amongst which are 'Building Cross-Cultural Competence' and '21 Leaders for the 21st Century'.

The answer to the dilemma, say Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, is to reconcile the opposites, to recognize that the cultures need each other.

Biography:

Trompenaars spent eight years with Shell, where he ended up working on a culture-related project, and then worked part-time for the company before founding the Center for International Business Studies.

The British academic Charles Hampden Turner is Trompenaars' long-term collaborator together they founded the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group..

Their work is based around exhaustive and meticulous research. The book which first established Trompenaars' reputation was 'Riding the Waves of Culture' (1993).

Since then he and Hampden Turner have written 'Mastering the Infinite Game' looking at differences in Western and Eastern values and the '7 Cultures of Capitalism' (1995).

Most recently, the duo have produced 'Building Cross-Cultural Competence' which argues that foreign cultures are not arbitrarily or randomly different but mirror images of each other's values.


Bibliography:
Source

Labels: , , , ,

Kenichi Ohmae: Business and corporate strategist who developed the 3C's Model.

Kenichi Ohmae made his mark twenty years ago with his book on corporate strategy. It is still a collection of good sense and clear advice, even though some of the examples may now seem a bit dated.

Successful business strategies, he says in "The Mind of the Strategist", do not come from rigorous analysis but from a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational.

Having written what many people regarded as the bible of corporate strategy, Kenichi Ohmae moved on to the changing shape of the world of business.

His thinking on these issues has been nicely brought together in his latest book, which he has called 'The Invisible Continent'. The Invisible Continent is the world in which businesses now operate, which is like a new, just discovered continent.

In the Invisible Continent there are four Dimensions:

1) the Visible Dimension - physical things to buy and make

2) the Borderless World - inevitable globalization

3) the Cyber Dimension - the Internet, mobile phones

4) the Dimension of High Multiples - exaggerated values put on some stocks by the stock market

But Ohmae has bigger concerns on his mind than business. He worries about the governance of the new continent, about a new sort of Cold War, fought by businesses rather than governments, and about the education of our citizens for this new world.

Biography:

Kenichi Ohmae is a business consultant, social reformer, author and journalist, adviser to governments and business entrepreneur, he has a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - and is a motor cycling enthusiast. For a period of twenty-three years, Dr. Ohmae was a partner in McKinsey & Company, Inc., the international management consulting firm.

Kenichi Ohmae is Japanese and lives in Tokyo but he is instinctively global.

He has written over one hundred books, many of them on Japanese public policy issues. Only half a dozen or so have made their mark in the West but these have been hugely influential, not least in explaining Japan to the rest of the world.

He now resides in Tokyo with his wife, Jeannette, and two sons, who share his spare-time interest in music, sailing, marshal arts, motorcycles, and scuba diving.

Bibliography:



Source

Labels: , , , ,

Gary Hamel: American Management Expert

In their book, "Competing for the Future", which came out in 1995. Hamel and Prahalad start off by pointing out that you can improve your results in two ways: by cutting your costs, or by increasing your outputs.
In their book, "Competing for the Future", which came out in 1995. Hamel and Prahalad start off by pointing out that you can improve your results in two ways: by cutting your costs, or by increasing your outputs.

But too many companies focus on the cost-cutting. So why don't people concentrate more on the output than the costs? Because their strategic vision is too narrow. It is defined by what the competition is doing.

It is, says Hamel, important to think about what is NOT there. That done, you need a strategy for doing something about it. A "Strategic Intent", forces one to think beyond the present and to contemplate new worlds.

Being different is really the theme of Gary's latest book, called "Leading the Revolution".  Most importantly of all he talks about the "grey-haired revolutionaries" - the companies that reinvent themselves time and time again. Anyone can have one great new idea or vision, very few can keep on doing it.
This is how Hamel's 10 requirements go:

1. Have Unreasonable Expectations
2. Make your business definition elastic, don't get fixated on one vision 3. Have a cause, not a business
4. Listen to other voices: young people, newcomers, outsiders
5. Keep an open market for ideas, don't shut anyone up
6. Have an open market for capital, allow people to bid for funds to support experiments
7. Have an open market for talent, so that people are allowed to work in areas that excite them
8. Encourage low risk experimentation
9. The principle of cellular revolution: breaking the organization down into small groups so that a failed revolution won't damage the whole organization
10. Allow personal wealth accumulation.Successful ideas should make money for the people who came up with them

Nevertheless, as Hamel agrees, you need both revolution AND luck to succeed in an uncertain world.

Biography:

Gary Hamel taught at London Business School for ten years. But he knew that if he was really to going to help companies build new capabilities, he would have to become more than an "armchair theorist."

So it was that in the summer of 1993 Hamel flew to Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, where it was all happening, and founded Strategos - his consulting company.

In his work with world leading companies such as Shell, Nokia, CGU, Ford and others, Professor Hamel and his colleagues at Strategos have helped management teams create rule-breaking strategies that have generated billions of dollars in new wealth.

He still keeps a couple of toes in the academic world, with Visiting Professorships at London and Harvard, but his attention is now focused on the leaders of business, rather than those who study it.

Although Hamel still holds a faculty appointment with the London Business School, he resides in Woodside, California.

Bibliography:


Source
Labels: , , , ,

Peter Drucker: Writer and Management Consultant

Peter Drucker is thought of around the world as the seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization.

We regret that Peter Drucker has died - however, his work is still highly influential, and for that reason the webpage and the radio programme about him have been left in their original format.

Peter Drucker's first great contribution was to focus on management as a discipline in its own right.

In 'The Concept of the Corporation', Drucker explained, for the first time, how and why decentralization worked. Drucker said decentralization was good because it created small groups where people felt that their contribution was important.

In 'The Effective Executive'  Drucker says the purpose of a business is to create a customer and a manager's main tasks are:

- to set objectives
- to organize
- to motivate and communicate
- to measure results
- to develop people

What Drucker wanted was a workplace where workers were trusted to get on with the job without too much supervision, where they knew what they needed to do and were clear about how it would be measured and how they would be rewarded. It was management by results rather than management by supervision.

In the 'Age of Discontinuity' Drucker focused on the changes in society and how the role of the manager would change too. The main changes he examined were:

- the arrival of 'knowledge industries' employing specialised workers
- the move to a global economy
- the move towards privatization.

Finally, Drucker started examining non-profit organizations which he called the 'social sector'. These organizations, says Drucker, are better than government in solving the social problems of competitive capitalism.

Peter Drucker is thought of around the world as the seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization.

Biography:

Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria and was educated there and in England. He took his doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany.

He then worked as an economist for an international bank in London.

Drucker went to the United States in 1937. He began his teaching career as professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College and for more than twenty years he was professor of management at the Graduate Business School of New York University.

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, Peter Drucker has, since 1971, been Clarke Professor of Social Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. Its Graduate Management School was named after him in 1984.

He is Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

Drucker is the author of more than thirty books which deal with society, economics, politics and management. He has also written a novel, an autobiography and a book on Japanese painting.

He is married and has four children and six grandchildren.

His main works are:

Source
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)