Turnaround time for Michael Dell

According to CNET News.com,”This Wednesday the latest Dell executive,Kevin Rollins, to leave as a result of Michael Dell’s housecleaning was the man perhaps second-most responsible for the company’s once-remarkable success.”

Richard Shim, an analyst with IDC,pointed out that:

“The usual bag of tricks-leveraging the supply chain and their economies of scale-hasn’t worked,” said after Dell announced the departure of Rollins.(Source:http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/2100-10878_11-6155260.html?tag=nl.e019)

In my point of view,as a leader, he/she has to be more sensitive to the changes of the business environment,for he/she is responsible for the company’s shareholders.The reason for the resignation of Dell’s CEO is that the changes of the PC industry are so fast that if the Dell is still stick to its coral business and would not make any changes to meet the customers’ expectations.He is bound to lose the market share in PC industry.Nowadays consumers are looking for a better look and also forming a trend to get used to use Laptop to replace with the Desktop. Thus the Dell may not just focus on Lower price PC market.(BTO or customersized PC) It is better to do some changes than do nothing. Therefore a big challenge for the leader as a CEO in a company is when is about time to change to make it more successful again.Now the founder of Dell,Michael Dell,came back again to serve as CEO and start to begin with “Dell 2.0” era.

: 01 Feb 2007 18:32 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

LE Module Review–Part II–Among the HK BSC BPR

3. Similarities and differences
The concept of Hoshin Kanri has been regarded as an approach to business policy deployment .This section is going to compare Hoshin Kanri with the other two approaches Balanced Scorecard and Business Process Reengineering and trying to find out their similarities and differences about policy deployment, based on the consideration of performance management.Also this section is divided into three parts.Firstly a defination of the three approaches would be defined by literature review.Secondly the similarities of the three approaches will be addressed.Thirdly the differences of the three approaches will be addressed.

3.1 Defination of three approaches
The definations of three approaches are defined as the followings:
Honshin Kanri:(HK)
In Minzunode’s words,”Deploy and share the direction, goals, and approaches of corporate management from top management to employees, and for each unit of the organisation to conduct work according to the plan. Then, evaluate, investigate and feed back the results, or go through the cycle of PDCA continuously and attempt to continuously improve the performance of the organisation.” [1]

Balanced Scorecard:(BSC)
According to Robert Kaplan and David Norton [2], “The balanced scorecard retains traditional financial measures. But financial measures tell the story of past events, an adequate story for industrial age companies for which investments in long-term capabilities and customer relationships were not critical for success. These financial measures are inadequate, however, for guiding and evaluating the journey that information age companies must make to create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation.”

Business Process Re-engineering:(BPR)
In Hammer’s words [3],”the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed”

3.2 Similarities
According to Minzunode [1], Honshin Kanri is an approach to help the coporate plan the deployment of the performance management to improve and achieve the goal.Similarily, Balance Scorecard is seaking for the coporate’s performance, alignment, and integrated targets to all organisations. [8]Also, for Business Process Re-engineering is an apporach to rethink about the measurement of company’s policy performance to achieve improvement toward a plan. [3]

3.3 Differences
According to Roberts and Tennant⁷, Honshin Kanri is a holistic view of approach to deploy the organisations’s policies and looks for the performance improvemet.With respect to the Balanced Scoredcard, Kaplan and Norton [4] noted that Balance Scorecard focus on the important metrics and followed by five steps about the deployment of functional level that drive success- financial perspective with customer, internal process, learning and growth perspectives.Furthermore,Business Process Re-engineering is a localized and incremental approach that delpoys complex processes to less improve the overall effectiveness of business operation.[5]

According to Mizunode [1] Honshin Kanri and is an approach to seek for continuous improvement of the strategic performance.Concerning Business Process Re-engineering Hammer [3] points out that it is an approach for inventing new ways to dramatically improve the measures of performance such as quality, cost, service and speed.

As for Business Process Reengineering, the term “reengineering” is used to be a reason for the company to lay off the employees and looks for new changes to improve the performance. In Davenport, Thomas’s words [6],”... once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly. Sougly that today, to most businesspeople in the United States, reengineering has become a word that stands for restructuring, layoffs, and too-often failed change programs.??On the contrary, according to Roberts and Tennant [7] Honshin Kanri and Business Scorecard [9] are approaches that seek for a strategic and continuous improvement of existing process.

References
1. Eureka, W.E. & Ryan, N.E. (1990). The Process-Driven Business: Managerial perspectives on policy management. ASI Press, Dearborn, USA.
2. Kaplan R S and Norton D P (1992) “The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance”, Harvard Business Review Jan ?V Feb pp71-80.
3. Hammer, Michael and Champy, James (1993), Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Business
4. Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1996) Translating strategy into action: The balanced scorecard, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
5. Guha, S.; Kettinger, W.J. & Teng, T.C., Business Process Reengineering: Building a Comprehensive Methodology, Information Systems Management, Summer 1993
6. Davenport, Thomas (1995), Reengineering – The Fad That Forgot People, Fast Company, November
7. Paul Roberts, Charles Tennant(2003), Application of the methodology at a higher education establishment in the UK, The TQM Magazine.15(2)
8. iSixSigma LLC ,http://www.isixsigma.com/offsite.asp?A=Fr&Url=http://www.skymark.com/resources/methods/balancedscorecard.htm, Dec.2006 accessed
9. Mandar Dabhilkar, Lars Bengtsson, Balanced scorecards for strategic and sustainable continuous improvement capability, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, 15 (4),2004

: 12 Dec 2006 08:24 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

LE Module review: Part I Coaching

During the game of coaching,what do you learn from it?

1. It is diffcult not to tell them the answer,for the content should be there,not yours.
2. Understanding is very important.(Walk and Listen.)
3. Should stay neutral/centre on coachee.
4. Sould be stick to the example.
5. No judgement-you do not have to like them.”Everyone is doing the best”
6. Coach needs to understand the coachee’s side.
7. Be ready to challenge.

I think coaching is a good way to listen to your employee¡¦s problems if the tasks allocated to them are quite unclear. Through the coaching, it will help you find what do they think and realize where the problem is and then follow their problems to give them some guidelines or tips to figure out the problems. During the coaching, it is the same way like two-ways communication. It is very important especially for the deployment of policy. For you have to make sure that each employee is involved and let them realize that their contribution to the company is also quite crucial. In the end through the coaching I think it is positive way with respect to deployment of policy management.

: 11 Dec 2006 10:32 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Leadership and excellence? Day 2 & 3

Activities:Winning Strategy (SWOT analysis of SurfWave Inc.)

• Learnt:

1. If the task is quite impossible to finish,why not try to negotiate for more time.
2. Is there could be good to have a leader in your group to finish your task on time?
3. The leader do not only mean that someone have to control everything.He maybe the guy who keeps on time plan,the process and most important of all is that make sure everyone are all participating and their ideas are also all included.
4. A good leadership also needs followers.
5. Strategy should be convinced that it will work.
6. As this is a module of leadership and excellence,everyone should try to practice to be a role as a leader.

• Presentation Qs.

1. If you are required to do five minutes presentation to the BOAD,it sometimes takes about 5-6 minutes. Be sure to do the time management.
2. Keep an eye contact to your audience not only for the board members.
3. If you show your flip chart to your audience,be make sure that the FONT size is large enough for them to read it clearly.
4. It is also important to defend the questions well,for that will show how deeply do you know about this topic.
5. Be sure to show up automatically at the right time even the time is up.

The analysis of matrix.(20 different definations of Leadership.)
Brainstorming of our group(TEAM 1) to come out our defination of Leadership.
The leadership is the art of gaining commitment to achieve shared goals by guiding, interacting, and motivating individual or groups.

TEAM2-The leadership is the framework used to influence people towards the achievement of a shared goal and vision by creating cohesis and supporting environment.

TEAM3-The leadership is the ability to control the system in the right direction to accomplish the shared vision and mission.

PAUL-The leadership is the process of influsing the thoughts or activities of followers toward achievement of shared goals.

• Key elements of the leadership:

1. Achievement of Shared goals
2. Commitment
3. Communication
4. Motivation
5. Guidance

Activities:Lifeboat (choose a good leader)
Learnt:
1.Under the emergent environment,the leader will sometimes automatically emerge.For example,Paul’s wife about the halt in the train station and someone show up and help direct the people.
2.Under the emergent situation such as sinking,we should have to think about the most effective one instead of trying to think about the backup one.There are so many changes there that we can not make sure.

My opinions about the qualities of being a good leader.

1. Be capable of haveing enough Knowledge that can convince people.
2. An easy-going people and kind to person.
3. Have a clear goal and direction in mind to lead the follower.
4. Be good at communication and also a good listener as well.
5. EQ must be high that he /she can deal with the emergent things in a proper ways.
6. One has a well-experienced skills in handling everything that is on the right path.

At first sometimes people will choose the leader according to their position power and experiecnes as the leadership.But we should try to look back to the defination of leadership and then choose who is good at leadership not only judged for their position power or something else.
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Quote from a very successful CEO”What is the secrect to be successful? He replies he hires the people who are better than me”
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The last part of EFQM system,”The result is the effect.”.It means that when CEO wants to achieve the goal of saling numbers of Financial department,he would like to add more manpower from the other department but this would lead the failure to the comoany.Thus the result is the effect.
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Unfinished :Have to look up the “Policy deployment.“

: 29 Nov 2006 15:57 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Leadership and excellence–Day 1

What have I learnt?

• “Leadership is like an engine that drive the business”,Paul said.

Why is this important?

• Leadership is the key role and also the first step of the business operarion process.

How way I use it?

• For there is no specific defination of the leadership according to the literature review,I hope I can use its concept and try to create my defination and apply it as my knowledge after finishing this module in the coming future.

: 28 Nov 2006 00:05 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem