Strategy Session

It’s tough when the rules are rewritten and what you thought was, isn’t anymore. That’s what happened to Microsoft this week.

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg said the European Commission acted properly in 2004 when it found that Microsoft had abused its near-monopoly position. Microsoft’s bill in fines and penalties could reportedly reach $2.77 billion.

What will this ruling mean to other tech cases? Does this spell trouble ahead for Apple, which dominates online music downloads? What about Intel?

In its ...Read More

I am struck by how much buzz there is about the social networking phenomenon. What Myspace started a few years ago is now branching out in numerous directions. Actually, what's happening is the opposite: social networking is becoming more niche oriented. 

The new trend in social networking is sites that are more vertical and target, say, specific professions, such as doctors (www.sermo.com) or those in advertising (www.AdGabber.com). LinkedIn is a professional site that is growing in popularity, and millions use it to exchange contact information and to recruit employees (although it doesn't target a specific profession as the sites I note above).

Other social networking sites are focusing on specific demographics, like the ...Read More

Most of us have heard of the Sports Illustrated curse (you know, when an athlete appears on the cover of SI, something invariably bad happens to him or her, like an injury or a slump). Now there may be an equivalent curse for CEOs.

Some researchers put this theory to the test, looking at executives who receive an award and seeing how their companies perform post-award.

Ulrike Malmendier, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Geoffrey Alan Tate, assistant professor of finance at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, compiled a list of more than 250 CEOs who won awards from any of 10 different sources since 1975 and found that their companies underperformed afterward.

A leader does something that he knows is wrong, but he does it anyway and maybe more than once. Then he gets caught.

Last night I learned about the punishment that the NFL commissioner imposed on Coach Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots for using videotape to try to steal the New York Jets’ signals during last Sunday’s game. The storied franchise’s reputation is now tarnished (new label: “cheaters”), and this is probably just the beginning of the story.

I thought of the similarities between Belichick’s behavior and the behavior of several executives that has come to light in the past year. For some reason some CEOs also think it’s okay to cheat and lie and break the rules (read: backdating stock options). In many ca...Read More

Should your shareholders or employees know that you are divorcing your spouse—for the sake of the business?

Some researchers are looking into what effects a CEO’s personal life may have on job performance. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, reporter Mark Maremont analyzes an emerging area of financial research that looks at the lives of executives and possible links to stocks prices and corporate performance.

Will an executive’s mansion purchase lead to an underperforming stock? In the case of CEO Trevor Fetter of Tenet Healthcare, yes, according to the article. Researchers David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State University have studied executives’ home purchases in a paper, ...Read More

Do you remember? Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the World Trade Tower?

I do, and I bet you, do, too. I live in downtown Boston, and I was working at home that day. I was on the phone, and the person on the other end suddenly blurted out that there was an accident in New York and a plane hit one of the Towers at the World Trade Center. I remember we thought maybe it was an accident, but then of course we all know what unfolded.

Here we are six years later. Yesterday I didn’t think too much about today, but when I was driving to the office in a suburb of Boston this morning and listened to the news on the radio it was hard to forget. All those memories of where I was, what I felt that day all came rushing back.

I recall that it was a glorious crystal clear day in Boston (unlike today, which is overcast and...Read More

I was amused yesterday by an item in the Wall Street Journal’s Work & Family blog. The author, Sara Schaefer Munoz, posed the question, “are your kids proud of where you work?” Some of her examples are quite amusing (the 11-year-old son of Wendy’s CEO Kerrii Anderson proclaiming to his mother, when she once said she might leave the company, “You can’t go work somewhere other than Wendy’s.”); responses from readers are interesting as well.

This reminded me of what Brian Dexheimer of Seagate told me about the company’s fast-growing Branded Products Division for an article I wrote on the challenges electronics companies face in the consu...Read More

Ah, the joys of doing business in the consumer world when you are accustomed to the business-to-business universe. You need to validate the software on the IC you’re manufacturing months before the manufacturing is complete to stay on schedule. What, you partnered with a company that overestimated demand for a consumer product? Guess you’re stuck with 40 weeks of product inventory.

As I reported in “Moving in: electronics companies shift—with some pain--to the consumer world,” companies will need to make adjustments—sometimes drastic ones—to play successfully in the market.

Would you change your company’s entire accounting system for a new class of customer? That’s what Seagate Technology did. “For...Read More

How many more times do we need to have rammed down our throats that India and China are creaming the U.S. when it comes to the numbers of engineers that are being produced yearly? Surely it must millions a year by now, right?

Okay, I'm being sarcastic. China produced more than 600,000 engineers in 2005, and India produces nearly 500,000 technical graduates annually. But even if those numbers are greater than the numbers in the U.S., there’s another element under scrutiny: what’s the quality of the education these students are receiving in India and China?

In many cases, the quality is not very good and they are having a hard time getting hired, according to a recent report in Newsweek International. Well, it’s no wonder that’s the case if engineering student...Read More

Attention entrepreneurs: you now have an online forum where you can tell your peers about your experiences with venture firms.

TheFunded.com, started four and half months ago, turns the tables on venture capitalists, who have traditionally been in the driver’s seat. The site’s mission: to help entrepreneurs secure necessary financings to grow their business and eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies that plague that process today.

The more than 1,700 members post comments on specific funds, and what they think of the principals and other general observations. Believe me, it’s not all sweetness. One comment called a senior partner “abrupt, interrupted frequently with comments that seemed to want to showcase his observations rather than be constructive to our pitch.” But you’ll get the good w...Read More

Baseball and engineering. There’s a connection, right? MIT knows it. We have a shortage of youth who are interested in choosing engineering as a profession and this country has a shortage of engineers, right? MIT decided to pair baseball and engineering for its first MIT Science of Baseball summer camp for eighth grade boys in Boston proper.

Boys.

The program, held during the entire month of July, helps boys develop math and science skills through hands-on learning activities that directly tie to key baseball skills. The kids work on their batting, running, fielding and throwing skills and play a scrimmage for half of each day, and then spend the other half in class where connections are made between the game and numerical and scientific analysis. Why d...Read More

There’s something about a 70-inch LCD HDTV that’s showing an action movie that makes me want to sit glued in front of it for several hours. If you’ll indulge me for just a minute, I want to mention a few of the products that Samsung Electronics showcased last week in New York—yes, the 70-inch was one of them.

I went to Samsung’s “Holiday in July” event to interview Scott Birnbaum, vice president of Samsung’s LCD business in the Americas, for a story I’m working on. After the interview I took advantage of seeing the latest products from Samsung’s con...Read More

Did you hire someone from Best Buy over someone from a competitor? Is that a guy fresh out of business school doing some market research for you?

An interesting study recently released drives home the fact that some electronics industry executives are struggling with how to keep up with the rapidly changing demands of the consumer electronics industry. (The study, "Competition at the Crossroads: Strategic Planning and Action in Disruptive Markets," was conducted by the Business Performance Management Forum and Deloitte Consulting's Technology, Media & Telecommunications group. I wrote ...Read More

Last month I wrote about the pilot project the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began on June 15 for open reviews of software patents, called the Peer Review Pilot.

The pilot is a joint initiative with the Community Patent Review Project (CPRP), organized by the New York Law School's Institute for Information and Policy. It will run for one year and patent holders agree to share their applications.

Let’s alter that concept a little bit and let people comment on all public patents and pending patent applications. Enter WikiPatents, a site launched six months ago by Peter Johnson an...Read More

My family and I just returned from a two-week vacation in Italy. One of my fondest memories of the trip occurred in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. As hundreds of us gazed at the masterpieces of Michelangelo in near silence at one of the holiest places on the planet, my 8-year-old-daughter approached me. Waiting for her to say something profound for a child her age, I smiled and listened eagerly.

“Mom,” she whispered. “Don’t forget…you promised to buy me a gelato later.”

Yes, that was the top-of-mind concern of this 8-year-old at that moment.

But can’t you relate? Haven’t we all been in a situation where we are physically in one place but our minds are entirely somewhere else? It all comes down to focusing.