Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Course Description

This seminar will examine how to leverage major technology advances to significantly transform a business and an industry in the marketplace. The seminar will draw heavily from the concrete experiences of IBM's major transformation in the second half of the 1990s, when it aggressively embraced the Internet and came up with its e-business strategy. The Internet and e-business played a key role in helping IBM survive the near-death experience that it went through in the early 1990s, reinvent just about all aspects of the company and once more become a leader in the IT industry.

The course will focus on the major issues that a business must deal with to successfully transform its technical and market strategies, including the organizational and cultural aspects that often cause such business transformations to fail. We will place a special emphasis on transformations that are caused by highly complex, advanced technologies like the Internet. We will discuss how such transformations require that managers have a very strong "systems" and technical intuition to enable them to make general management organizational, business and marketing decisions. We will also explore how the kind of "holistic" thinking that you would expect from good engineers might translate into a business advantage in formulating and executing market strategies.

Course Outline

Introduction

The first seminar will be an introduction to the overall course, including the huge competitive pressures that every business faces to keep innovating so they can survive. We discuss IBM's own near-death experience in the early 1990s, and how it reinvented itself by embracing a number of major technology, market and organizational innovations.

Strategy Formulation

The next seminars will discuss what goes into formulation a technology-based strategy. This includes understanding how to evaluate the opportunities, risks and limitations that this presents to a business, and what other companies, including competitors are doing. We will have detail discussions for what it takes to formulate technical and market strategies, including what works and what does not and why, false starts and how to quickly evaluate them and change course.

Operationalizing the Strategy

We will next focus on how execute the strategy in the marketplace. This includes doing a detail market and application segmentation to identify the most promising and practical ways to get started, engaging with customers in early pilots so they can help shape the strategy, and the role of communications at various levels, from press to advertising, to have a simple set of messages in the marketplace and start building mind share. We will discuss the need for a close interplay between the technical work in the laboratories and the activities in the marketplace in order to arrive at a successful strategy.

Organizational and Cultural Issues

Next we deal with the very important issues involved involved in trying to build any kind of new business in an existing company, especially a business like the Internet and e-business that cuts across the whole company and is transformational in nature. We will look at the role of internal and external communications in shaping the culture, the balance between grass roots efforts, - usually led by the technical community in the company, with top down leadership which is led by senior executives, and the many ways that things can go wrong and derail the business transformation, often with dire consequences to the business.

Class Schedule