This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. What causes companies to fail spectacularly? A recent study of 750 of the biggest U.S. business disasters of the past 25 years reveals that seven popular but risky strategies are often to blame. Drawing on that extensive research, Carroll, a journalist, and Mui, a fellow at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, describe seven sirens that lure companies onto the rocks. One is the synergy mirage-hoped-for but non-existent merger synergies. Group disability insurer Unum unwittingly pursued these when it acquired individual disability insurer Provident, assuming the units could cross-sell each other's products. It turns out they had entirely different sales models and customers. Pseudo-adjacencies also lead companies astray, as school bus operator Laidlaw learned when it spent billions on a move into ambulance services. The firm expected its logistics expertise to carry over but discovered ambulances were not a transportation business but a highly regulated health care business demanding skills it sorely lacked. Faulty financial engineering, stubbornly staying the course, bets on the wrong technology, and rushing to consolidate are all dangerous, too, as Conseco, Kodak, Motorola, and Ames can attest. And a rollup of almost any kind is a high-wire act in which a slight market downturn is all it takes to finish you off. If the executives at these companies had taken a closer look at history, they might have avoided billions in losses. But even experienced teams can fall into these traps. The best way to safeguard your company against them is to institute a formal strategy review by a devil's advocate panel not involved in strategy development. Its members must have license to ask tough questions, say the authors, who offer guidelines to help panels focus on facts, test assumptions, and bring to light flaws in the strategy that could lead to costly blunders.

【書誌情報】

ページ数：16ページ

サイズ：A4

商品番号：HBSP-R0809F

発行日：2008/9/1

登録日：2012/3/28