Juguk

FORBES:
Why Do Americans Hate Their Best Companies?

A sure fire way to get readers for a Forbes post is to trash a leading American company. Of course, you can also write about Apple, too – that’s always a good option. But I hope I’m drawing attention to something that goes beyond the fanboy psychology of America’s relationship with corporations like Apple. The American business audienceseems to have it in for companies like Microsoft, GE, CISCO and indeed GM. It’s the flip side to Apple-love.
But you can check back on some previous outings. Back in February Eric Jackson wrote a spectacularly successful article on spectacularly unsuccessful CEOs – it received over 2 million views. In May Adam Hartung had a stab at a few CEOs, too and scored an audience of over 400,000. Larry Downes’dissection of Best Buy back in January garnered over 3 million readers.
So, being in a totally un-belligerent mood today, I think there’s a lot to learn about the emerging economy by looking at how these companies are adapting. I don’t mean to say, let them off the hook. But I am puzzled over the other issue – why we are too impatient to grasp where change is coming from and what it means to howcompanies function and how we do our jobs.

How To Succeed Like Apple and Amazon

 Apple and Amazon are forcing analysts to rewrite the rule books. Neither conforms to the linear growth patterns of the past. Apple’s results seem barely believable, they are so far off the scale. And Amazon, a retailer, the disruptor of big box stores, stepping into own-device production and then growing anapps community, and a content production community…. companies are supposed to focus on their core competency not just pick and choose what they want to do.
But these two champions of American enterprise are showing the way. They are leaving the majority of companies scrambling to uncover what, exactly, would allow them also to ignore the basic tenets of management theory, and to succeed wildly.#1. Core competency is dead and if it isn’t kill it off
The idea of core competency grew in an era where enterprises wanted to be conglomerates. It was accompanied by plenty of evidence that once a company tries to step outside what it knows really well, once it tries to use skill-sets it has not mastered, it suffers. Today, and into the future, a company needs to manage interactions – and at hugescale. That’s the basic skill. Master it and Amazon-style adjacencies become possible.
a. Communications is now instantaneous and subject to huge surges, as people latch onto an idea, product, concept, personality. Wildly successful companies create platforms that allow them to manage these highly scaled, global, instantaneous communications. Examples? Siri and Kindle are interfaces to massivelyscaled interactions, as isFacebook (though we wait to see if Facebook has a commercial future without a device or interface innovation).
b. The ecosystem often creates the end-product. What consumers actually consume is an app or a book, an interaction. The wildly successful enterprise creates the platform on which these interactions take place, interactions that deliver to increasingly narrowbands of customer needs. The platform owner does not need to create the product or service, it needs only to enable it.
You could argue that the core competency is alive and well. We just need to call it the platform. But that would only disguise the massive shift in enterprise operating systems that has taken place. Challengers need to emulate or recreate that shift for themselves. They need anew sense of what the enterprise operating system consists of. It is not being good at customer care or invention or branding. It is the creation and management of platforms for highly scaled interaction.
 
# 2. Creating the platform
One of the questions executive teams began asking four years ago is: How come Apple can attract tens of thousands of developers to its platform? And get all that...