February 2, 2007
Dear Friends,
Welcome to your premiere portal for advanced education on business, strategy frameworks, solved business cases, and special book offers. This is your portal to further your business experience / executive education in a non-competitive, at your pace, non-threatening, environment.
With this edition of the portal, we are adding key Tech Strategy frameworks as practiced by top consultants. To illustrate the value of such frameworks, let me give you an example.
I had used the S-curves framework to address a key corporate strategy bottleneck that Sun Microsystems was suffering from in the aftermath of the technology meltdown in Silicon Valley. After his 2002 LinuxWorld keynote, Mr. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, was presiding over a Q&A session.
In this session, I got a chance to draw out the above picture on the whiteboard, which caused some embarrassment to the other Sun executives in the panel. But the executives were silent, since the question was addressed to Mr. McNealy, the big boss. Based on the above depiction of a fermenting Linux underneath a stagnating Solaris, I asked Mr. McNealy this question:
“Mr. McNealy! When a disrupting technology ferments underneath a mature one, the mature and established technology igonres the disruption, because the disrupting technology is behind in terms of technology adoption. However, as time progresses, the nascent technology takes off where as the older one stagnates. Linux is disrupting Solaris as we speak. Soon Linux will take off, and Solaris will stagnate and die. Should not Sun change its one chip (SPARC) – one o/s (Solaris) strategy and embrace Linux with open arms?”
However, Mr. McNealy disagreed that Solaris was sitting on the top of the S-curve, and that Linux was disrupting his business model. He maintained that Solaris was still taking off, and not stagnating. Nevertheless, in his keynote an hour back, Mr. McNealy, to Sun’s credit, had showcased an appliance which could run both Linux and Solaris. But this was not on any of their core product lines (Sun Fire servers). So, Sun was embracing Linux, but hesitatingly…
Fast forward five years. Today, Sun touts that Solaris is free (like Linux is), and Open Solaris is open, like Linux is. However, time has passed, Scott McNealy is no longer the CEO of Sun, and the Sun stock has been less than ten dollars all this time…
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The above depiction shows the utility of frameworks, as a means to crafting strategy. Please check the S-curves and other such frameworks in our section on Tech Strategy frameworks. Please use these frameworks in your job interviews, and to outwit those numb-nuts executives as you go about doing your day to day business.
The solved cases in this portal are in the Socratic dialogue format. While crafting these solutions, we have kept the structured approach in mind, which top consulting firms emphasize while evaluating would-be management consultants. Top consulting firms routinely reference our work from time to time. For example, Mercer Management Consulting referenced our article on Five C's in a presentation on Strategy Frameworks to Kellogg Business School; please check this link for details.
I did not get enough response to the business thought posed in my last note. So let me ask it again. What is more scalable: a product or a service? A product, obviously. So let us take some scalable products available: software, iPods, and cars. In your opinion, please explain to me which is more scalable: software, iPods, or cars? And why? I will publish your responses in due course.
We have added sections on key business concepts, and are adding new concepts every day. If you find any particular business concept to be lacking in detail / elucidation, please email us stating how the particular concept can be further improved. This portal has greater social good as one of its key incentives, so we do appreciate your feedback.
Life is long, party hard.
Enjoy,
Sam Mishra, MBA (MIT Sloan)
