Sergio Marchionne, who engineered a merger of the auto industry’s weakest companies – Fiat and Chrysler,  and turned the combination into a profit generator, recently and su… Read More

A couple of years ago, BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, announced it was spinning off its aluminum and magnesium businesses, plus several other mining entities. … Read More

Completely changing the business model in an industry is not an easy thing to do.  On the other hand, it creates incredible rewards for the innovators.  Netflix is a primary exampl… Read More

In what appears to be a slow-motion march toward bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble announced its recent quarterly earnings; a -5.3% revenue decline to $1.2 billion and a loss of $63.5 million… Read More

After a couple of years of chaotic behavior on the part of the top management of Uber, it has a new CEO who is now working hard to clean things up and to set a direction for the company. His… Read More

The fast-food business has become extremely competitive in the U.S. over the last couple of years as McDonald’s key competitors, Wendy’s and Burger King, came out with aggressive… Read More

As cable TV’s most expensive channel, ESPN has found themselves in the unfortunate position of having the big cable distributors offering discounted packages that didn’t include… Read More

The current Morgan Stanley CEO took his job in 2010.  The company was struggling badly coming out of the 2008 recession, during which Morgan Stanley’s share price had sunk to $14… Read More

I recently read a summary of a study on the “unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.”  It was authored by two academics that wrote it in a style that suggested they b… Read More

Recently, Nike learned the hard way that you need to know what employees are experiencing.  Specifically, the press reported that this saga began with several female employees complaini… Read More

One of the key attributes of a strong, courageous leader is the ability to get people to pursue an aggressive plan for improvement.  In doing so, lots of dialogue takes place as the pla… Read More

In recent months the business press has been filled with stories of the weak performance of General Electric.  Many comparisons have been made to the lack of leadership in the last 15 y… Read More

It was 2015 when the acquisitive Brazilian investment giant, 3G Capital, took over Kraft Foods and merged it with HJ Heinz, the catsup maker, which it already owned.  In this deal, Warr… Read More

Innovation is a topic that you hear a lot about these days.  How does it happen?  I think you can learn a lot by looking at examples that have occurred over the years that have had… Read More

Founded 25 years ago, BlackRock has quickly become not only the world’s largest asset manager ($5.7 trillion under management), but also the dominant leader in the fastest growing inve… Read More

The CEO of Tesla, who is also the Chairman and Co-Founder, is clearly an amazing visionary.  The Tesla all-electric car has created a major inflection point in the automobile industry a… Read More

Back in 1999, Xerox was the king of the document copying business and had just achieved its peak market value of almost $50 billion.  In Asia, Xerox operated with a partner, Fuji, and t… Read More

It was 2013 when the current CEO took over the leadership of the classic retailer Sears.  His task was to stop the share price decline; virtually a straight line from $120/share in 2007… Read More

The book called Rescue of the Bounty is an exciting, true story of an ill-fated, 2012 voyage of a fifty-year-old, 180 foot, wooden ship called Bounty.  It was a replica of the HMS Bount… Read More

In 2006 General Electric launched a four-day training program called Leadership, Innovation and Growth (LIG) at their famous management development center in Crotonville, New York.  In… Read More

When the current CEO of Microsoft took the job in 2014, the company stock price had been floundering for the past 13 years in the $25-$37 range.  He quickly moved into action to focus t… Read More

It was very recently announced that the percentage of Americans who subscribe to Netflix is now equal to the number that subscribe to cable TV services.  To understand what has made Net… Read More

A recent article in Fortune magazine discussed the massive loss of market share by Gillette; moving from 71% when it was acquired by Procter and Gamble in 2005 down to its current 59%. It po… Read More

It is not much fun to be a part of an organization that is at best treading water with no clear roadmap to break out and get on an exciting path of progress.  That certainly was the cas… Read More

The New York Yankees baseball team had a great year in 2017.  Given that several of their starting players were very young, they were not predicted to make the playoffs, but to show big… Read More

It’s amazing to see many of the major retailers simply stand by and watch their business atrophy.  On the other hand, there are a few that work hard to get out in front of the key… Read More

Amazon is paranoid about hiring and developing top talent!  For example, it has hired 97 MBA’s from MIT over the past 5 years, more than twice any other tech company.  Steppi… Read More

Seventeen years ago, in November 2000, GE named a new CEO.  GE had just completed a highly successful ten-year period where the stock price went from $5/share to $55/share.  The pe… Read More

A lot has been written recently about the ousted co-founder and CEO of Uber who has tried to get his job back.   He had been fired by the board of directors because, after the comp… Read More

Recently I was interviewed by journalists Dr. Thomas Clark and Richard Zaunbrecher on the importance of communication skills for a leader.  This interview is below and my hope is you wi… Read More

With the stock market regularly hitting new highs, there are numerous companies that are blessed with exceptional leaders.  The CEO’s of two technology behemoths are particularly… Read More

In recent weeks, the press has been full of stories and analyses of the various accidents involving Navy ships over the past year.   What’s becoming apparent is a complete la… Read More

During the period from 1991 to 2000, Cisco Systems was the leader in providing the switches and routers that were the heart of internet infrastructure.  During that period, Cisco’… Read More

In its recent quarterly earnings announcement, IBM noted that the division built around Watson, the generalized artificial intelligence tool, experienced a revenue decline of -1% versus year… Read More

It is a psychological fact that if a deer is standing in the dark on a road and a car’s headlights shine on it, the deer is blinded momentarily and it freezes.  The funny thing is… Read More

While rarely getting public attention, Adobe, the maker of Photoshop and many other software tools, has been one of the great success stories in the technology sector in recent years. … Read More

On the surface, you would expect General Electric to be turning in good business results.  Most of their divisions are very strong players in their industries, for example GE Aviation… Read More

Tesla makes a very good car and has certainly created high interest in electric vehicles.  On the other hand, it’s amazing how regularly the Tesla leader will over-promise and the… Read More

The big news at Ford recently was the firing of the CEO who had been in place for three years.  The stimulus for this is the fact that Ford’s business is suffering.  Specific… Read More

Uber, the ride hailing service, has been a remarkable success.  This competitor to the traditional taxi business now operates in 570 cities worldwide.  On the other hand, the compa… Read More

Whole Foods was founded in 1980 by its current Chairman and CEO and for three decades was the preeminent organic grocery brand.  It was quite successful as consumers began to crave orga… Read More

Private equity (PE) firms are different.  They invest in companies with the intent of quickly improving their efficiency and profitability.  They then either sell the company for a… Read More

The primary job of a leader is to constantly assess the situation, develop an impactful plan that will make a significant difference, and then implement with excellence.  Being a leader… Read More

Gillette has dominated the razor business for decades.  They have religiously followed a narrow strategy of adding new features and convincing consumers via advertising that they are wo… Read More

One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to terminate a project; even if it has been clear for quite a while that its potential is minimal.  Two factors are typically at work; 1)… Read More

Toshiba was founded in 1873 as Japan’s first maker of telegraph equipment.  Its reputation grew over the years as it became the countries first producer of lightbulbs and eventual… Read More

A few years ago two researchers launched a huge project that surveyed tens of thousands of people residing in various organizations around the world, asking the question: “What do you… Read More

Uber, and particularly its CEO, has a reputation as being super-aggressive and in-your-face.  In recent months Uber has been battered by a barrage of controversies that have called into… Read More

Over the years it’s surprising to see large successful companies, like Kodak and Blockbuster, stare into the reality of important new business trends, like digital photography and the… Read More

This past January, South Australia, one of the six states that make up the country of Australia, suffered a severe electricity outage. One month later, the city of Adelaide within South Aust… Read More

Fortune Magazine does a daily newsletter and recently the lead article was about Unilever’s CEO and the observation that he has become the poster boy for responsible capitalism. … Read More

The general public, the media and especially members of the U.S. Government have been shocked at President Donald Trump’s propensity to use Twitter multiple times daily in order to mak… Read More

Fortune Magazine recently ran an article on the growing number of examples in Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs have taken a “fake it til you make it” approach to starting a bus… Read More

Back in September of 2015, the CEO of Volkswagen was forced to resign just days after the U.S. environmental authorities disclosed that the company had rigged diesel engines to cheat on emis… Read More

Tesla Motors has been all over the financial news recently, and usually not for positive reasons. Here are three fundamental problems they are having: 1.) Unreliable Sales Forecasts –… Read More

It was 1886 when Richards Sears and Alvah Roebuck started up the retailer that took the name Sears and Roebuck. It began as a mail order operation and it wasn’t until 1925 that it bega… Read More

John Glenn’s recent death reminds us that as the first man in space in 1961, he set off a hugely successful space program that demonstrated a remarkable track record of excellent execu… Read More

Over the last couple of years, many HR professionals have argued that performance appraisals should be abandoned. Their point is they are awkward to give and they are biased. They stick peop… Read More

In recent years, Samsung has been the smartphone market leader. While Apple makes the most profit, Samsung sells the most units. Its unit market share is 22% globally while Apple’s is… Read More

The financial community is officially worried about Apple with its market share being off over ten percent versus its fifty-two week high. No doubt most of this decline is due to the iPhone… Read More

Google, the search engine giant, is generally known as an incredibly innovative organization. It prides itself in having a very open culture with few working constraints; all designed to gen… Read More

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BlackBerry recently announced that it will stop developing and marketing its own smartphones. This is no surprise, given they have stated they had to sell about 5 million/year to break even… Read More

IBM is struggling, having seen its revenue decline for 17 straight quarters. It is staking its future on several new technologies; particularly cloud services and Watson artificial intellige… Read More

Recently Intel agreed to sell a majority stake in its McAfee computer security business to a private equity firm. A few months earlier it announced it would slash 12,000 jobs, 11% of its wor… Read More

According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, people are switching jobs during their career at a higher rate than ever before recorded. This fact caused two academic researchers to rece… Read More

About a year ago Warren Buffett paid $37 billion for Precision CastParts (PCP) Corporation, a highly successful company that makes complex parts primarily for the aircraft engine industry. B… Read More

The financial results which Twitter just released for its most recent quarter were characterized by weak user growth, weak revenue and a disappointing outlook. This caused an immediate -10%… Read More

IBM’s revenue declined by 2.8% in the most recent quarter. The gains it made in its new businesses of cloud computing and data analytics were more than offset by the continued declines… Read More

“Empowerment”, especially when discussed by HR professionals, is a topic that can get out of hand with respect to just how independently employees can operate while maintaining s… Read More

A clever research tool for measuring innovation was developed a few years ago by researchers at INSEAD, the highly-rated global graduate business school. It ranks companies on their innovati… Read More

It has been a tough few weeks for the leader of Tesla, but he himself is the cause of a lot of their problems. For example, once again it turns out they have massively over-promised on the n… Read More

Much has been written recently about the problems at Yahoo. When a new leader was hired in 2012, there was a lot of hope. This person was the 20th hire at Google and had helped that start-up… Read More

Over the years, a lot of business gurus have pontificated on why organizations fail. This is not surprising since on any given day, you are likely to learn about some firm that is struggling… Read More

Over the past four years, Walgreens, the giant drugstore chain, has been executing a plan to spend about $50 million to place in about 40 of its stores a machine developed by the start-up Th… Read More

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invests in companies that are solid and mature with attractive and steady profits. Examples are Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, Geico insuran… Read More

A bad boss can do a lot of damage. Importantly, he or she can badly injury your career. Besides not properly developing you, you might get used as a scapegoat for bad things that happen.&nbs&hell…Read More

Recently the CEO of Intel Corporation, the giant chip maker, announced plans to eliminate 12,000 jobs, an 11% decrease in its workforce. For perspective, over the past five years, Intel&rsqu&hell…Read More

Very recently, Fortune magazine had Jeff Bezos of Amazon at the top of its list of the greatest leaders in the world. The article praised him for being the father of e-retailing, cloud servi… Read More

I recently ran into an example of a terrible use of teams. The company is of good size, $11 billion a year of revenue, and they have five product divisions. The CEO asked the CFO to launch a… Read More

Members of an organization need to have confidence in their leaders. When employees see their leaders making embarrassing misstatements or obvious exaggerations, some credibility is lost and… Read More

Members of an organization need to have confidence in their leaders. When employees see their leaders making embarrassing misstatements or obvious exaggerations, some credibility is lost and… Read More

Tens of millions of people have gone to YouTube recently and viewed a two-legged humanoid robot trudge through snow, while surprisingly maintaining its balance. Another humanoid robot stretc… Read More

Recently I saw an article that celebrated the fact that it has been 25 years since the first digital cellular system and phone were invented by Motorola. Back in its glory days, Motorola als… Read More

Successful organizations tend to become complacent. In some cases that disease becomes so bad the company gets obliterated. Over the decades, there have been many high flying examples such a… Read More

Tesla recently announced its 4th quarter, 2015 financial results.  Revenue was $1.75 billion and its loss per share was $2.44; both falling short of analysts’ expectations. Concer… Read More

Recently a popular financial analyst on Wall Street took a cold objective look at Apple’s most recent financial results and then boldly stated: “Apple, a boring stock? As boring… Read More

In the past two years, General Electric has done a good job of facing the fact that its business model of the past several years had run out of gas and that it needed to break out of the sta… Read More

Recently it was announced that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) lost $5 billion in their most recent fiscal year which ended Oct 1, 2015. The last year America’s post office earned a pro… Read More

Our ability to make good decisions is a critical determinant in our long term success in both our personal and professional lives. A few years ago a group of academic researchers got interes… Read More

From 2005 to 2012, we saw a major shake out of the consumer electronics retail business. CompUSA, Circuit City, and Radio Shack all went bankrupt and the lone remaining player was Best Buy w… Read More

General Motor’s faulty ignition switch saga, which has been a major story for the past year, made us all aware of just how bureaucratic a company can become. The problem began in 2005… Read More

In last week’s blog, I talked about the leadership problems at Yahoo. In the past week the discussion of what the troubled company should do emerged as a hot topic, as the Yahoo board… Read More

It is amazing how Yahoo’s top management just keeps providing us with lessons on how a strong leader should NOT act. The latest wave of negative articles about what is going on at Yaho… Read More

Smart people are capable of doing some very dumb things! Volkswagen is the latest example. For the past decade, automobile manufacturers have been hustling to satisfy increasingly tough emis… Read More

Costco, the warehouse retailer, has been fabulously successful over the years. For perspective, its stock price has gone from $48 in 2005 to $155 today. An integral part of that success has… Read More

The technology world was surprised on two fronts by Dell’s effort to acquire the storage company EMC. First, it was the largest acquisition in the technology world ever ($67 billion)… Read More

A recent Wall Street Journal article about Yahoo pointed out that if you strip away the value of the Alibaba shares which it owns, then “the market is assigning little to no value to Y… Read More

  By Rebecca O. Bagley If you don’t do it, your competitor will. That was the message former Microsoft COO Bob Herbold delivered to professors, students and business leaders… Read More

During the 2003 to 2007 period, Abercrombie & Fitch was highly successful, featuring clothing for the “elite, cool, young adult,” with advertising that was very brash and sex… Read More