People Wit

Rangkaian Artikel yang saya posting secara berseri ini saya kutip dari Buku The Apple Way : 12 Management Lessons from the World’s Most Innovative Company karya Jeffrey L. Cruikshank. Banyak Point dan pelajaran tentang management yang bisa kita ambil dari Perusahaan paling inovatif di Dunia ini. Mari kita belajar dari Keberhasilan dan Kegagalannya. Selamat Menikmati.

David Yoffie, professor and strategy expert at the Harvard Business School, talks about Apple Computer with equal parts of detachment, frustration, admiration, and amusement. And he knows whereof he speaks: He was a close advisor to John Sculley in the early 1990s and was well connected in the high-tech community in general. Today, he sits on Intel’s board, so he knew sooner than most of the world that in the spring of 2005, Steve Jobs would startle the Apple community once again by embracing Intel chips for the next generation of Apple computers.

In fact, Yoffie himself had tried to broker exactly the same marriage more than a decade earlier. In his role as wise counselor, he arranged a meeting between Intel’s Andy Grove and John Sculley, hoping that a face-to-face encounter with the legendary Grove finally would force Sculley to come to terms with some harsh realities. “There is no way,” Grove told Sculley, as the grim slides rolled by, one after another, “that IBM can make the microprocessors you need. Only Intel can do that.

Look at our range of products versus theirs. Look at our volume versus theirs. It’s not even close.” Sculley was clearly shaken by Grove’s presentation, which included graphic summaries of Intel’s enormous chip volume. He promised Yoffie that he would think hard about what he had just heard.

A week later, Yoffie had dinner with a group of senior Apple managers, who—although they hadn’t been in the room with Sculley and Grove—had since seen a version of Grove’s presentation. “Intel must be selling a lot of microprocessors into toasters,” one of the managers said offhandedly.

Yoffie was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” responded the manager, “God forbid that they’re selling them all into computers! If they were, well, that would be bad news for us!”

But of course all (or almost all) of those microprocessors were going into computers— millions and millions of Wintel computers— and Apple was already en route to its marginal position in the PC industry.

Which leads us to the first of six strategic lessons that Yoffie draws from the long and turbulent saga of Apple Computer: