Group items tagged

An interesting portrait of the founder and CEO of SAS and of the corporate culture he created at his company, completely geared towards well-being, work-life balance. .. and somewhat less at financial wealth. As it appears, it seems to be a good way to extract commitment and productivity from highly-skilled knowledge workers.

BMW is trying to change the American way to buy cars. The German carmaker has to deal with a cultural issue and it's finding lot of skepticism by U.S. consumers. The issue is a built-to- order vehicle worths the wait, challenging Americans' penchant for instant gratification. BMW effort to change this trend may run into cultural barriers and it's a big gamble, hardly a new business model.

A nice comparison history between Kodak and Fuji. Aside from issues associated to culture and organizational inertia, it seems that the basic error was related to identifying core competencies, witih Kodak focusing on "imaging" (but then messing up with execution) and Fuji on chemicals.

An interesting article on the impact of web 2.0 culture on firms and the way knowledge is created and circulated.

Boeing is suffering more than two years delay in launching its new composite-material 787 airliner and order cancellations are coming in. The reasons are interesting. First, Boeing has not only severely forfeited the product development capability it has always shown (e.g. in the 777 program) by shifting its attention and top management culture from engineering to sales. Second, it has inappropriately increased the degree of outsourcing, given the type of innovation involved. Using composite materials instead of alluminum for the airframe clearly is a radical innovation. Given that airplanes have an integral architecture, Boeing should have just done the opposite and developed competencies internally.