Welcome CEO Blogger! He claims to be an anonymous CEO from a small publicly traded company. Found his link at Emergent Chaos and it looks like his blog will offer some much needed perspective.
February 7 Fortune Magazine has some great articles:
Profile of Toyota CEO Fujio Cho and the Toyota philosophy. Toyota sure knows about production - they (Taiicho Ohno) invented lean thinking and refuse to stop learning. The big weakness I see is that they lack disruptive innovation although they excel at incremental innovation. If they could combine their productions systems with the kind of innovation waiting to be tapped by Smart cars... there would be a revolution. Speaking of which - Mercedes is having a tough time trying to turn around Smart - they can't figure out how to make money on it. They dumped Mitsubishi which was supposed to help and have life breathed into it. Too bad Swatch couldn't hold onto the car.
Then there are some inside stories on New Line Cinema - what now after LOTR? Some good insight into Hollywood. I spent a couple years there long ago and it smells the same.
Great article on HP and Carly Fiorina - they don't cut her any slack and they shouldn't. Basically they demonstrate that the HP Compaq merger has been a complete failure and that the shareholders have suffered at the expense of management. The reaction at the top has been to pass the buck, not take responsibility and make excuses (as well as some requisite sacrificial lambs). How many companies are being led by people who really don't know how to lead? She may be very hard working and smart but that really isn't enough to dominate the market the best they can hope for is to hang on to past glories and milk it for all it is worth. Hartman and Sifonis in their book Net Ready point out that of the four essential areas for a business leadership is the most important component that all others depend on.
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