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Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objective

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Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objective

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

To get to the next level, your firm needs audacious goals and the strategic determination to reach them.

Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Bill Davidson aims to show CEOs how to achieve the impossible. Based on a study of 70 companies that accomplished incredibly ambitious goals, he offers a straightforward set of guiding principles to reach "breakthrough" success. Davidson anchors his prescription in the experiences of real firms and illustrates each point with anecdotes. His case histories and tactical advice offer something of value to every CEO or senior manager. This book is for executives whose companies are trapped in strategic dead-ends and desperate to blast out, or to leaders who'd rather act before a crisis.

Summary

The Breakthrough Phenomenon

By 1992, IBM seemed stymied by circumstance despite its history of massive strategic leaps. IBM had introduced the great mainframe computers and depended upon them for decades, although the firm did not stagnate. IBM invented the personal computer, for example, and moved aggressively into the PC business. Yet others, namely Intel and Microsoft, reaped much richer gains from IBM’s PC innovation.

IBM virtually created Microsoft by choosing DOS as the operating system for the PC, and was an early, though not terribly astute, investor in Intel. IBM owned 20% of Intel at one point, having purchased the shares for between $600 and $700 million. Big Blue sold its stake somewhat prematurely in 1987 for a billion dollars. By 2000, that stake would have been worth more than $60 billion.

In 1992, Intel and Microsoft were companies with a lot of growth potential, but the writing already seemed to be on the wall for IBM, which reported its first loss that year. Clearly, the company needed radical change to survive and return to prosperity. Big Blue required a new leader and breakthrough thinking to restore its glory.

Breakthrough is a change...

About the Author

Bill Davidson was a tenured professor of management at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California from 1985-1998. He is the author of The Amazing Race and 2020 Vision. He is chairman of the consultancy MESA Research.

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