Daily Archives: January 17, 2013

Business Lessons Learnt

Boeing’s Dreamliners yet to have dreams come true

Boeing’s 787 line has been suffering some serious setbacks and bad PR lately. Well, it’s one of the most publicized product lines for Boeing. It has a long delay and it attracts long attentions. The result of any mistake is thus amplified by the time duration of the product finally coming to the market after years of delays.

It’s not the only noticible story ever in the business world. Another big company, once neighbors to each other,  has similar “Lessons Learnt” to Boeing still fresh in mind: Microsoft’s Vista launch. After 5 long years of waiting and delays, the product was reviewed unfavorably by the customers. Microsoft quickly corrected the actions in the next better OS launch after Vista, but a quick fix for an airplane model may take some time. Still, how Boeing deals with the current challenge will be critical for the big company’s image.

There hasn’t been such a Murphy’s Law which states: A significantly delayed project will result in poorer quality and worse customer acceptance. Well, it is very much the truth though in many cases. 

So what are the true reasons behind these significant drawbacks or failures?  Too many creative ideas? Too many unpredicated innnovations? To much publicity resulted in unrealistic expectations? Too daring? Too hard to manage? Bad economy? Yet, wait please, aren’t all of these already included in the normal categories of project management tasks – especially risk anticipation and risk management? To the end, a well-planned and well-managed project should encompass all and still can lead to a successful product completed on the expectations of time, budget and quality. Sounds like the true talents of such capability are still rare in big companies. People are usually the most unpreditable cause of any major failure.

Business Strategies

6 Common Business Strategy Errors

We like very much the summary of the common errors on business strategies from the book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. By A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

The Economist magazine today helps give a succint notes of these common strategy errors:
 

  • The Do-It-All strategy- No choice, no priorities.
  • The Don Quixote strategy-  Attacks the company’s strongest competitor first like a fool.
  • The Waterloo strategy- War on too many fronts at once.
  • The Something-For-Everyone- Tries to capture every sort of customer at once.
  • The Programme-Of-The-Month-The populist approach, pursuing whatever fashionable in an industry as a strategy.
  • The Dreams-That-Never-Come-True strategy- Never translates ambitious mission statements into clear choices about which markets to compete in and how to win in them.

Business leaders are tasked to make their strategies work and avoid these common errors. That may be easy to say than done. For new business, we’ve seen so many easily falling into the above categories. We all need keep in mind and keep practicing.  And then, most importantly: “no strategy lasts forever”.