Want to Be the Next Apple? Lose the Bafflegab

Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is “Dilbert“-fodder that generates cynicism and contempt. It is, at best, a big waste of time.

Neither is strategy a declaration that the ABC Co. will increase sales by 20 percent a year for the next five years, with a profit margin of at least 20 percent. Strategy is not the resolve to hunker down and try harder — what Kenichi Ohmae of McKinsey criticized in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article as “do more better.” Effort is not strategy. Neither are financial projections. And neither are wishes.

A strategy “is a way of dealing with a high-stakes challenge,” Rumelt told me in an interview. “It’s a way around the obstacles or problems in a difficult situation.”

Every good strategy, he writes, includes what he calls the kernel: a “diagnosis” of the challenge (“What’s going on here?”), a “guiding policy” for dealing with that challenge (the core idea often called a strategy), and a set of “coherent actions” to carry out that policy (the implementation).

Is this what the Administrative Master Plan will give us?

An attack has been found for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm: AES crypto compromised by ‘groundbreaking’ attack. The new attack cuts the time to about half what a brute force attack would take, which means it would still take trillions of years, so this this isn’t a reason to stop using AES. (There’s really nothing more secure.) This might motivate people to look into developing newer algorithms.

I guess all I have to blog about these days is computer history: The IBM PC is 30 today.

Yesterday I attended the Southwest regional Computer Measurement Group meeting. Barry Merrill started his talk by recounting how he got started in computers as a sophomore at Notre Dame in 1959. One of the things I like about CMG meetings is they make me feel like a youngster.

I don’t mean to turn this into a technology history blog, but the IBM Selectric typewriter will turn 50 on Sunday. I learned how to type on one of those.

I should probably find time to blog more often. Anyway, here’s another look at the history of computing: Microsoft’s MS-DOS is 30 today.

I was busy cleaning up after our Disaster Recovery test yesterday, but I didn’t want to let the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (later renamed International Business Machines) pass unnoticed. I owe a lot to IBM: my father worked for them starting when I was about a year old until I was 21, and my job here (and at one previous employer) has always involved lots of IBM hardware and software. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the fact that IBM hasn’t always been a force for good or even a force for progress in the IT industry. (I noticed that the page I linked doesn’t mention that Thomas J. Watson was appealing a felony conviction for restraint of trade violations when he started at IBM. He remained a firm believer in monopolies his entire life.)

So it’s been an interesting century. If I had any hope of being around I’d say it will be interesting to see if IBM is still around in another hundred years, and what it will be like if it is.

I’ve thought for a while that the University would do well to have more information about its finances easily available from the home page, so I was encouraged at first when the “Budget 101” link showed up as one of the articles linked in the changing banner section. (And by the way, the longer this distracting element is present, the more annoying it becomes.) But on reading the article, it appears that the University missed an opportunity here.

First of all, Flash? Ugh! When will this abomination disappear from the web? OK, thoughtful, usable things can be done in Flash, but it seems they rarely are.  The Flash development culture has always been more about showing off and eye candy than about creating helpful, informative, usable experiences. Also, today most of the things that required Flash can now be done with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and often done more accessibly, more informatively, and more respectfully towards the end user.

Perhaps it’s because I’m currently rereading Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations, but the cartoonishness of the graphics and the paucity of actual data really seem inappropriate. As an example of the paucity of data, how about instead of pie charts of 2011’s income and expenses, showing line graphs of how those have changed over the past decade or two? Similarly with the bar chart comparing tuition at the University to peer institutions: why not a graph showing how that has changed over time? And why not show the amount expended per student, again over time and compared to our peers?

The videos of Kevin Hegarty were OK, but why not provide transcripts? Where was the captioning?

While this was better than what the University has provided in the past, less effort on glitzy effects and more on seriously communicating information would have made for a more credible message.

Update: There are captions on the videos; I just didn’t see them.

How Google Does It

Schmidt is describing an organization that exemplifies many of the most forward-thinking management values: empowerment, trust, engagement, alignment. And very much to his credit, he does it without using any of those buzzwords. (Not that buzzwords are always bad. There’s nothing wrong with talking about, say, transparency, for example.) People are going to do what they do. A company that can actually fill positions with people who actively want to do the things the job requires, who were going to perform those tasks anyway–that company has a tremendous advantage.

Of course, it takes leadership to build that kind of organization.

The Top 7 Stupidest Things Believed by Bad Companies

Yea, I know UT isn’t exactly a “company” in the sense he means, but a lot of this applies.

In other words, a bad company looks just like – sometimes even better – than a good company.  And if you buy into that look, you will be as dumb as they are.  Because bad companies fail – and when they do, they cost their customers, their employees and their investors dearly. Most of these companies were once good companies in their day, and now leverage long established names built on the backs of innovators of a previous era. They can exist, coasting for years or even decades, but fall far short of their potential.

A former management consultant comes clean: The Management Myth

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?