Endring for enhver pris?

Omstilling er nødvendig for de fleste bedrifter, men hvor radikal kan en omstilling være?

Business Week har et intervju med Clayton Christensen, mannen som kom opp med Disruptive Innovations teorien.

I intervjuet diskuterer de strategi og Clayton bruker Apple som eksempel på et selskap der det kanskje ikke var riktig å forsøke å endre selskapet, selv om den nye strategien kanskje var den mest fornufige.

Business Week:...Apple has another strategic option: to focus on continuing to develop new markets with its proprietary, innovation-heavy approach, harvest them, and move on.

Clayton Christensen:<We have a case about this at Harvard [Business School], about when John Sculley was the CEO of Apple in the early 1990s. He actually had remarkably clear vision about where the industry was heading. He had three priorities. First, he felt the company needed to get its price down to $1,000, from $3,000 or $4,000 at the time. The second thing was to open up the architecture, by selling the OS. And the third was that handheld devices were going to be big. He was right on all three, but the culture of Apple was just so strong that Sculley just couldn't change the direction of the ship.

So I always ask the students, "What would you do if you were on Apple's board?" And they always say the same thing: "Crucify him, and bring in a good manager."

"So who would you bring in?" I ask. And they say: "Bring in someone really strong, who can make those decisions." So what did Apple do? They brought in Michael Spindler -- a strong general manager type who was known for his operations ability. Well, that didn't work out.

So I ask, "What would you do next?" And they say: "Bring in a good manager -- someone who can turn the company around." Well, they brought in Gil Amelio, who had turned around National Semiconductor. But he only lasted 18 months or so.

So then they bring Jobs back. And why did the company prosper under Jobs? The students' instinct is to say, because he's a good manager. I think the reason is that he stopped trying to change the company. He wanted them to do what they had always wanted to do: make cool products, based on proprietary architectures.

Selv er jeg en person som ofte har irritert meg over at ledelsen i endel selskap ikke skjønner hva som er til bedriftens beste og istedenfor tusler videre i samme tralten. Kanskje er det slik at det noen ganger er det riktige? Manglende omstilling vil naturlig nok senke endel skip (selskaper), men det kan tenkes at det kanskje er bedre å forlate skuta enn å prøve å endre kursen hvis man ikke deler kapteinens synspunkter.