In LO 14102 John Constantine reminded us that there are individual people
in each of the types of competitors that occur in corporate ecologies -
not just corporate names. He is certainly right, but I have also observed
in both consulting and research for a book on business growth strategies
that company-wide inclinations toward one role or another in a competitive
ecology run very deep.
Most of the people in positions of power in companies got there because of
their abilities to conform to the companies particular inclination
(something I call growth path in my book: Go For Growth). Many, but not
all, of the employees that contribute the most, and are most satisfied
working in a particular company, are those in sync with the inclination.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, just common.
(If interested in some of the business school research in this area, check
out the work of Miles & Snow, Danny Miller, Lawrence & Lorsch and Alfred
Chandler)
In contrast to what John Constantine noted, I've been surprised at how
frequently new individuals at the controls, to use his words, behave
exactly the same as those who came before. Again, this is not always the
case (a company in crisis with a CEO from the outside like Fisher at Kodak
and Gerstner at IBM is more likely to see a shift in
competitive/ecological inclination). But executive changes in companies
like Marriott, Pepsi, Apple, AT&T, GM, and P&G have not resulted in
significant shifts in their companies stance in their ecologies, even
though the new executives made many other changes.
Toyota's new management, as well as Sony's, are leading significant change
efforts, the net direction of each, though, is to bring the companies back
toward their longtime competitive orientations (Toyota as an aggressive
market share acquirer, Sony as a rule breaking pioneer).
I am far from having any lock on all wisdom regarding how corporations
compete. But I've found it's useful to see the impact of a person in a
corporate system as something that's usually (but, again, not always) a
part of that system, not something
freestanding-while-also-having-a-potent-impact on it. Getting to a
position of power in an organization can be a nice place to be, but there
has usually been a price to pay for it.
Bob Tomasko
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>