One of the things that was so thrilling about Dell’s early business strategy was how clear and simple it was. Dell built high-quality but essentially commodity computers faster and cheaper than anyone else and developed superior supply chain and order taking processes that took years and years for competitors to even approximate. Looking at Dell and HP’s bidding for 3PAR recently, I think M&A run amok like this usually means the companies involved don’t have a lot of other strategy ideas to execute. It’s a shame to see Dell trying to buy growth now in contrast to their early strategic clarity. Continue reading 3PAR Overbidding Is a Sign of Cookie Cutter Dell Strategy
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For anything you do, there’s a tradeoff between staying organized (keeps you on track but takes time away from the actual work) and just focusing on the work itself (you make progress, but you might end up less sure of the schedule or whether you’re even working on the right thing). This dilemma is especially true of most consulting projects, where you’re strapped for time from the get-go and you potentially have a lot of different balls in the air. In general, I find that management consulting projects benefit from a moderate amount of project management overhead. The same is not true of many information technology projects, where teams and scope are often much larger and the end deliverable may be much more complex. Continue reading Lightweight Project Planning for Consulting I’ve been thinking about what makes a good business analyst, and in general the soft knowledge is harder to pick up in many cases than explicit knowledge like accounting or marketing. To that point, here are a few of the rules of thumb I try to follow. None of them is particularly sophisticated, but I include them because they are the issues that people tend to neglect when rushing to finish a project or a deliverable. These more ambiguous thought processes are often what separate good analysts (and for that matter decision-makers) from great ones. If you follow MBA news, you might know about a recent book called Rethinking the MBA. It’s an offshoot of an internal strategy project at Harvard Business School, and it describes the current state of the MBA, its strengths and shortcomings, and ways that business schools are trying to make the degree more useful and relevant. I took a quick look and wanted to share my thoughts. Continue reading Rethinking the MBA Now that we’ve taken a closer look at analyzing cost advantage, let’s turn to differentiation. The topic is a complex one, and to be honest, Porter’s organization of it can be a bit haphazard and difficult to follow. I want to walk through the thought process in this post. Once we have that foundation, the next post in the series will take a closer look at Procter & Gamble. Continue reading Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter, Part 4 |
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