Some people never learn...

The Wall Street Journal is claiming that Microsoft has it's MOJO back. Microsoft's Director of BusDev is turning up the PR hype machine. But haven't we all heard this song and dance before, especially after two internet or media giants merge?

SynOptics & Wellfleet

3COM and US Robotics

AOL and Time Warner

Lucent and Alcatel

So why will this one fail as well?

1. Geographic distance - Seattle and Santa Clara are both in the same timezone, but even technology like Telepresence or Halo isn't going to recreate the impromptu water-cooler meetings where most strategy gets originated.
2. Cultural differences - An Internet company and an Enterprise (and failed Internet) company. Oil and water don't mix.
3. Don't buy the Competition - People matter, and people that were competitors the day before don't easily become friends with "the enemy". This is a great way to have the best people from either company leave. And this little tidbit of detail won't make things any easier.
4. Lack of Innovation - While Bing is new, and contains some interesting technology, it's not a leap forward. It's an incremental difference that isn't sustained by superior scale or cost savings.
5. Lack of Problem Solving or Value Creation - Microsoft has tons of cash. Yahoo has tons of users. Neither could figure out how to bring new value to the business in the face of Google's growth. Merging the two doesn't create any new value for customers.

I was at Cisco for about 125 acquisitions. We didn't get all of them right (maybe 15-20% were big hits), but we made sure to try and meet each of those criteria before pulling the trigger.

In the digital world of the 21st century, scale is critical, but innovation trumps all. The media loves a big story, but rarely do shareholder benefit long-term when financial engineering replaces innovation.

Some days you're the pigeon, someday days the statue...

Sometimes it's very easy to tell if you're the pigeon or if you're the statue. The day usually starts out one way, and just keeps going in the same direction.

And then sometimes you get a day like I had yesterday. We received an email from our Global Strategy professor with the details of our final exam. The final is a case analysis, focused on how you'd analyze the current and future strategy of the company in the case.

The company highlighted in the case is VMware. At first I had a rye smile on my face because VMware is one of my global alliance partners, with my team spending about 75% of their time on joint activities. We live and breathe their strategy, and how it interacts with our strategy, on a daily basis. So on the surface, this final should be fairly straight forward.

But then I started thinking about it a little more. How much would I be biased by my existing knowledge and our current company strategy? Are we actually doing the right thing? Quickly this moved from a slam-dunk academic exercise to a real-world activity that has broader implications. On one level, I need to nail the final because it impacts my grade (the least of my concerns). On the next level, I need to determine if my company is making the right strategic decisions, comparing the academic/theory approach to our corporate approach. And finally, if I conclude that the company is making a mistake, I need to figure out the best approach to selling an alternative strategy to our leadership group.

There are times when getting an MBA seems like a long drawn-out process, littered with theories and papers that are sometimes difficult to comprehend how they will be applicable back in the real-world. And then occasionally the starts align and it hits the bulls-eye, making the late nights very worthwhile.

"Inside a Chinese Gadget Factory"

[cross-posted from our WFU MBA China Trip 2009 blog]

This is an interesting perspective on the Chinese manufacturing industry from a worker at Foxcomm, a electronics company that makes products like the iPhone.

It's sometimes difficult for Americans to reader these and not cry "slave labor" or "sweat shops", but it's probably more important to step back on consider a few additional concepts:

1. As this person states, there are literally thousands (or millions) of people moving from the farms to the urban areas, and these jobs offer the opportunity for more pay than they have on the farm. So while the working conditions aren't ideal (whatever "ideal" means), they offer the potential to make financial progress for themselves and their families.
2. While there has been discussion about wage inflation in China in knowledge-worker sectors, there are still waves of workers moving from farms to cities that will allow Chinese companies to retain their cost advantages for potentially a generation. This is why you see the emphasis on the systems for new-hire training.

I highlight this not because I'm trying to justify the actions of Foxcomm, but rather to bring light to the environment in China for anyone that will be doing business over there (your company) or dealing with competition. As our visit with VF highlighted, it's important to disconnect from our Western biases and experiences when doing business in Asia. It's not the same, and the sooner we can adapt to their culture the sooner we will start to understand why they have taking their actions in that manner.

"The Last Inch" (maybe only in America)

A recent post from SAMBA about trying to close sales. I highlight this post not because I disagree with the concept or the emphasis. It's like the old Glengarry Glen Ross scene with Alex Baldwin about ABC (Always Be Closing). I highlight this post because of a comment made by one of our guest speakers this weekend. I won't disclose their name (due to the nature of their work), but the speaker is a WFU MBA graduate that runs a successful International business with a focus on US-China opportunities.

Our speaker's company often acts an intermediary for US (or Western European) companies attempting to do business in China, often for the first time. He said one of their client's biggest mistakes is often believing that a signed contract is the end of the negotiations. That it actually means something. He cautioned us that this is often not the case. In fact, it often should be considered the first step in the real negotiations. In China, there is a concept called "a chop". A chop is a physical stamp (from a device called a "chop") that is much closer to a valid/legal signature than the one signed on the dotted line on the contract.

It's also worth noting that many deals require more than one chop, just like many projects in the US require more than one license. The bigger the project, the more chops you may need. For example, our visit in Beijing with United Family Hospitals (Chindex) shared a story about starting a second hospital in Shanghai that required 186 chops.

So I agree with the gang over at SAMBA, make sure you're finding ways to get the deal closed. But also make sure you know the context of your environment, so that signature (or chop) actually means something.

The Future of Education, MBAs?

Recently, there's been a spike in new educational "institutions". Ranging from University of the People to Seth Godin's SAMBA to Jack Welch's Management Institute to Richard Branson's School of Entrepreneurship. Are these fads, since the publishing industry is going under and folks like Welch and Godin need new outlets for their work, or is this another nail in the coffin of the traditional MBA? With BusinessWeek for sale, and potentially no longer existing, will the BusinessWeek rankings for MBA programs continue to be relevant, or will this get picked up by a blog?

Just like every other large institute that was prominent during the 20th century, traditional universities are now having to adopt to greater global competition and distributed/democratized competition. How they adapt to this new environment is a chapter that will be written over the next 5-10 years.

An Indian Feast

After the Mumbai/Bombay hotel bombings in January, one of the side-effects was the canceling of the India International trip. While our classmates did get to experience China, South America and Japan, we missed out on anyone experiencing India. To give us a small flavor of India and create another great group activity, the families of our three Indian classmates (Vish Manickam, Manoj Kumar, Mohan Sakhamuri) hosted a tremendous feast of Indian cuisine. As we found with all our international experiences, not only was the food excellent, but the friendliness and hospitality of their families was incredible.

We're thankful to the insights into India that we receive from our classmates, and we're especially thankful to their wives for such a wonderful outing.

Saturday Tradition Continues - "WFU SOB"

Continuing our on-going tradition of Saturday wearables, we unveiled our latest design to commemorate the renaming of the Wake Forest University Schools of Business. This is one of those situations where we're not completely sure that the marketing and branding people thought through all the ways that the new name might be represented. Never the less, the "Executed" Class of 2009 is always happy to rally around a group activity.

Invention vs. Innovation (and thinking differently)

One of the topics we've discussed recently in our Global Strategic Mgmt (GSM) course is Innovation and how that differs from Invention (or Discovery). Having worked in the technology industry for years, and having been lucky enough to work on innovation-centric teams most of the time, I've seen my fair share of both sides of the discussion.

Several years back, I worked with a group of people looking to radically change the way that companies collaborate (internally & externally). So we kicked off a project called "Emergent Collaboration", focused on how we take all the sources of knowledge that are floating around a company and morph that into something that is useful to huge numbers of people. There are some remnants of the project in these videos:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Ultimately, the project got cancelled because we couldn't sell the concept to our internal business units. Looking back on the project, it's very clear that not only did we not target the "pain points" of the customers clearly enough, but we also got too caught up in thinking about the problem through old lenses. Too often, we used concepts that existed in the previous problem instead of coming up with new paradigms

Recently, Google announced the planned launch of a new product called Google Wave. Not only does it appear to solve many of the same problems that we focused on with Emergent Collaboration, but more importantly, they constantly bypassed previous concepts and came up with new innovate ways to solve customers problems.

Who knows how well Google will do with Wave, they've struggled to monetize some previous non-search projects. But no matter what happens, it is an excellent example of how to think innovatively.

Starting Something on the Side (The Environmental Capitalist)

Inspiring by an upcoming class project, a few passionate classmates, an Adam Carolla podcast with Ed Bagley Jr, and the horrendous smog in the great cities of China, I decided to start a side project called The Environmental Capitalist. Going completely against everything I've learned about strategy, planning and business models in this MBA program, I'm not exactly sure where it will go. It feels like it needs to be a community building effort, with a few splashes of education thrown in. I have a bunch of ideas, but we'll see where it goes. Check in from time to time to see if anything interesting emerges.

Summary of (SA)MBA Learnings

This is an excellent summary of the learnings and experiences from Seth Godin's SAMBA program from @BeccaNY. While their program is more condensed than the WFU program, I believe that I've seen very similar changes and learnings from myself and my classmates. If nothing else, an MBA program can be a great excuse to get out of your day-to-day rut and explore what you can make happen based on the trial and tribulations of your classmates and coursework.

NOTE: I just noticed that all of the participants have provided updates on their views on the programs. Lots of interesting insight, and probably some suggestions for institutional MBA programs.