| 作者 |
 【戴尔评论好文推荐】The Matter with Dell - 迄今为止我看到的最好的戴尔评论文章 |
 |
XiamenTurtle
[博客]
[个人文集]
声望: 博导
加入时间: 2004/02/20
文章: 3036
海归分: 30
|
|
|
作者：XiamenTurtle 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
【戴尔评论好文推荐】The Matter with Dell - 迄今为止我看到的最好戴尔评论文章
作者是楼下我推荐的管理类新书 《Halo Effect》作者，Professor Philip M. Rosenzweig。
其真知灼见：
In fact, HP and Lenovo were both spurred to improve in large part because of Dell’s excellence. That’s not an excuse, but a reflection of the reality of competition — outstanding success in one time period stimulates rivals, who raise the bar and make it tougher to maintain success.
-------------------------------------------------
The Matter with Dell -- According to the Press, the Pundits, and the Professors - By Philip M. Rosenzweig。
Just two years ago, in February 2005, Dell Computer was named the World’s Most Admired Company by Fortune magazine. Now, with performance slumping, Michael Dell has removed CEO Kevin Rollins and taken the reins to revive the company he founded.
The Dell saga offers one more example of the way that storytelling obscures clear thinking in business. Of course, the decline of Dell is an irresistible story. How the mighty have fallen.
And the press, the pundits, and the business school professors have been quick to offer a diagnosis of what went wrong. Business Week explained: “Dell succumbed to complacency in the belief that its business model would always keep it far ahead of the pack.” It was “lulled into a false sense of security.” It was guilty of “hubris.” A management consultant writing in Leadership Excellence concluded that Dell “got stuck in a rut” and became “reluctant to change.” When rivals matched Dell’s customization, managers “fell back on an old practice: they cut costs to maintain market share.” The Financial Times quoted Professor Peter Morici at the University of Maryland, who opined: “They have forgotten how to make customers happy. I have to believe the problems with the company are cultural and they begin at the top."
It seems that everyone is a management genius — at least after the fact. But a closer look at Dell suggests the story is a bit more complex, and that facile judgments should be tempered.
Start with the notion that Dell was “complacent.” Exactly what evidence is there of complacency? Did Dell and Rollins neglect their business by spending long evenings at Austin’s famous country music night spots? Did they walk around their office whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”? Not at all. Years ago, Michael Dell and his top lieutenants knew that their dominance in personal computers wouldn’t last forever, and they identified new growth opportunities. They focused on their core strength — a disciplined fast-cycle manufacturing process—and identified related hardware products where they might apply this capability, such as computer storage, printers, and televisions. Dell also acquired a company — ConvergeNet — that promised a sophisticated new storage product. Placing a major bet on a new technology — that’s not exactly complacency, either. Further, Dell responded to renewed competition by finding new ways to lower costs, hardly evidence of an unwillingness to change.
A fair-minded assessment suggests that, at the time, extending the efficient manufacturing model into related products was a sensible strategy. Imagine, for a moment, that Dell had ventured into entirely different businesses, such as software or consulting, or into a very different product segments. That’s much less sensible, and if things hadn’t worked out, the press and the pundits would be hammering Dell for having “strayed from the core,” for abandoning its core strength in pursuit of an impossible dream. That would be “hubris.” Michael Dell would be accused of arrogance and derided for a naïve belief that he could succeed in very different market.
True, Dell wasn’t as successful in those new areas as it had hoped, but that doesn’t mean it made a mistake. The simple truth is that in a competitive market economy, high performance comes from decisions made under uncertainty—which means running risks. Not all decisions will turn out well, but that doesn’t mean they were bad decisions.
The worries at Dell are in large part relative, not absolute. HP has greatly improved, especially since Mark Hurd took charge in 2005. Lenovo, too, is a stronger contender, in part because it’s run by William Amelio, a former Dell manager, who brought with him some of Dell’s legendary strength at efficient execution. In fact, HP and Lenovo were both spurred to improve in large part because of Dell’s excellence. That’s not an excuse, but a reflection of the reality of competition — outstanding success in one time period stimulates rivals, who raise the bar and make it tougher to maintain success. Once performance has faltered, of course, it’s easy for pundits and professors to claim that someone blundered. Decisions that turned out badly are castigated as bad decisions. But that sort of casual thinking misses the realities of competition in a free-market economy. Strategy is about choice, and choice means risk.
Here’s hoping that Michael Dell won’t be distracted by the Monday morning quarterbacks, and will bear in mind what every company must do to be successful: make a sober assessment of its capabilities, combine that with a deep understanding of customers and a clear-eyed view of the competition — and take chances in order to be different from rivals. In a free-market economy, that’s what competition is all about.
作者：XiamenTurtle 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
|
|
|
| 返回顶端 |
|
 |
|
-
 【戴尔评论好文推荐】The Matter with Dell - 迄今为止我看到的最好的戴尔评论文章 -- XiamenTurtle - (5536 Byte) 2007-2-28 周三, 15:48 (1745 reads)
|
|
|
|
您不能在本论坛发表新主题, 不能回复主题, 不能编辑自己的文章, 不能删除自己的文章, 不能发表投票, 您 不可以 发表活动帖子在本论坛, 不能添加附件不能下载文件, |
|
|
