книги / PRactice Book

Desperate days, drastic measures By John Gapper

The telecommunications equipment company was losing cash and the flow of orders had dried up. George Simpson, its chief executive, and Sir Roger Hum, its chairman, both resigned that day. The new management team appointed by Derek Bonham was not brought in from outside. They were insiders who were eager to fix the mess in which they were implicated. They were given the chance partly because of their links with customers and partly because there was no time to seek an alternative. In that period, it defaulted on its debts, sold many businesses and trimmed others, cut £1bn of 20 costs from its operations and supply chain, and made 20,000 people redundant. Yet it has survived. Its original shareholders lost virtually everything, but those who invested in the company when it relisted in May 2003 have done very well.

Michael Tory of Morgan Stanley, which advised Marconi, says that their achievement was extraordinary: "They retained their customers' confidence, rebuilt morale and kept the company operating in the cruelest environment the industry has ever seen." This is how Marconi put their rescue plan into practice, (a) A small group of senior executives worked closely together on a plan to revive the company. They had detailed ideas for how to cut staff and other costs, restructure the company's finances, focus the company on a few key products and maintain customers' confidence, (b) Each task was carefully planned and targets were set for what had to be achieved over a set period. The work was divided among managers with individual responsibilities who were answerable to the wider group. (c) The company's senior managers explained to investors, staff and key customers exactly what they intended to do, the difficulties 6o they faced, and the milestones they intended to hit. They reported on progress regularly. (d) Marconi eventually made 20,000 people redundant across global operations in Italy, Germany, the UK and the US. They had clear procedures, offered retraining and counseling, and convinced unions not to stand in the way. (e) They enlisted the help of their biggest customers to decide which products they needed to invest in, and which should be dropped, (f) The company continued to invest heavily in research and development to find products that it believed customers would eventually start to buy again, (g) The managers worked with Marconi's suppliers and its engineers to raise operating margins. This involved not just cutting costs, but finding ways to innovate while keeping product costs steady. It encouraged suppliers to move production facilities to countries in Asia and Eastern Europe.

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When companies need diplomats By John Gapper

You may recall a song released 23 years ago, by Fun Boy Three and Bananarama, called "T'aint What You Do, It's The Way That You Do It". Translated into a corporate motto, this means: it matters more to be able to engage and inspire those around you than to be a master strategist. Or, as Lou Gerstner famously declared at the start of his tenure at the then-troubled IBM: "The last thing that IBM needs right now is a vision." Lately, big companies seem to be heeding this dictum in their choice of chief executives. Instead of hard-driving alpha males (and females) who come to their jobs like whirlwinds, vowing to shake everything and everybody up, boards are turning to diplomats. The latest is Sir Howard Stringer, who was named chairman and chief executive of Sony on Monday. For a long time, Sir Howard's uncertain role in his early days at Sony in the US and willingness to chat genially not only to Japanese executives but also to analysts, journalists and even passers-by led to him being written off as powerless. It turns out he was talking to the right people. His rise follows the elevation of Dick Parsons, whose previous role as vice-chairman included being an amiable front-man for Gerald Levin, at Time Warner, and the ascent of Chuck Prince, a sagely reassuring lawyer, at Citigroup. So these are good days for diplomats. But if a glad-hander wants to get the top job, he ought to work for a company with two traits: big and in trouble. When conglomerates such as Time Warner and Citigroup get into trouble, they need alternative medicine. Time Warner was in turmoil following its takeover by America Online, and was riven by infighting, when Mr Parsons was promoted. Citigroup was doing better financially but had to convince the office of the New York State Attorney General and its regulators that it could behave itself as well. Mr Prince is still working on that. In the MIT Sloan Management Review last year, Jay Conger and David Nadler drew a distinction between "content" and "context" corporate leaders. Content leaders are people who believe in strategy, the power of the right answer and "direction by declaration". Context leaders emphasize values, culture, relationships and teamwork. Nobuyuki Idei, former CEO of Sony, faced a choice between the two types in considering Sir Howard and Ken Kutaragi, the head of its PlayStation division, who has been openly critical of failures in other parts of the company. If he had been brave, he might have taken a bet on Mr Kutaragi. But it is hard to argue with Mr Idei's instinct that Sony first needed a rejuvenating leader.

Of course, the choice between a context and a content leader can be cyclical. If the first type is most effective in troubled organizations, the second may outperform when things are better. One reason for Mr Kutaragi to accept demotion from the board this week with good grace was that, if 63-year-old Sir Howard does a good job, his moment could come. But there will always be a place for a corporate diplomat when things have gone awry. Companies are comprised of human beings, not just ideas and strategies, and it helps when the person in charge knows it. As Fun Boy Three and Bananarama put it, that's what gets results.

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Caveat emptor: a rule for the new deal By Nancy Hubbard

Enough time has passed since the great merger wave of the late 1990s for us to reflect on its lessons. But we do not have long to contemplate them, for acquisition momentum is growing again.

Yet success still eludes most mega-acquirers. Evidence suggests that the majority of acquisitions do not benefit shareholders in the long term. Valuations tend to be excessively high and targets impossible to achieve. Add to that the vast amounts of management time required by acquisitions and it is clear most acquirers would have been better off channeling their efforts into growth from within. Imagine bringing together two organizations that ostensibly mirror each other in size and function: two finance, marketing and research and development departments, two sets of manufacturing or retail sites, differing information technology and international operations. Add to that the extra complexity of different countries, cultures, time zones and languages, and it becomes easier to see why most acquisitions fail.

Yet some succeed. Corporate acquirers can achieve their cost saving and synergy objectives even across different countries and cultures. In the earlier wave, most successful mega-acquirers used external consultants to assist with implementation. But now, increasingly, acquirers are bringing the implementation process in-house, hiring former consultants, among others, and building their own expertise in acquisition. But why create a significant internal resource for something that happens only occasionally? In the long term, it may cost less than hiring consultants, who can charge up to £15m a month. It also offers companies greater control over the process. Over time, a company's internal merger and acquisition (M & A) skills may become so well honed that they become much more likely to make future deals succeed.

Less expensively, managers can develop an in-house acquisition methodology. Such a methodology is a set of guidelines and documented processes created by managers, representing the company's collective knowledge and experience about mergers and acquisitions. An in-house methodology can also aid pre-acquisition processes by setting out guidelines for planning, checklists and a database of key individuals with specialist acquisition expertise. Such guidelines can also help when selecting and managing consultants, and ensures they operate within the company parameters without duplicating work. Some might argue that creating this kind of inhouse methodology for acquisitions is more expensive and time-consuming than it sounds. Yet the cost of getting deals wrong is growing ever higher. As M & A returns to the corporate agenda, it is high time companies took control of the processes that determine their future success or failure.

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Super-fast Blue Gene looks for answers By Alan Cane

William Pulley blank, the mathematician behind IBM's world super-computing record, has a new mission: to find ways to help chief executives make better decisions faster and to tackle problems that they have put in the "too difficult" box. Mr. Pulley blank, working with a team hand-picked from the company's brightest and best, is taking a fresh look at some of the most complex problems facing businesses and governments around the world. His credentials for the job as head of IBM's Centre for Business Optimization, which was established in 2004, are impeccable. He led the team that built Blue Gene, the supercomputer that last November took the world super-computing record by a huge margin, processing information at an extraordinary speed. With Blue Gene, Mr Pulley blank has huge computational resources at his command. He and his team can help chief executives manage highly diverse types of data and, by doing so, help them to understand and improve the performance of their business. The Centre for Business Optimization, located in upstate New York, is an in-house think-35 tank, drawing on expertise across IBM. The aim is to find practical solutions to practical problems. "If we provide an airline with new schedules that save 20 per cent of the cost of current schedules, that is pretty compelling," says Mr Pulley blank. "If we can raise customer satisfaction with an airline by 10 per cent, that is also persuasive." This practical advice is becoming a new and potentially lucrative strategic direction for IBM. It is part of a category of services worth, according to Sam Palmisano, IBM's chief executive, about $500bn (£263bn) globally - that is in addition to the $l,200bn business spends on information technology every year. So far IBM's centre has tackled a series of practical business problems. These include: The flow of passengers through airports. The "Paxflow" simulator combines flight reservation data from Amadeus, the airlines' computer system, with IBM's algorithms. It predicts how many passengers will be arriving or departing at any particular time up to a week in advance.

The diagnosis and treatment of illness.

IBM is collaborating with the well-known Mayo Clinic to improve the way that it diagnoses and treats illness. In particular, it is helping in the development of new ways to analyze the patient data that the clinic has built up over the years.

Firefighting

. The research centre is working with the US Federal government to plan for forest fires. Mathematical models are being created to predict how a fire will behave and how to allocate resources to tackle it. Of course, some problems may be impossible to solve and even the world's largest IT company cannot afford to have its top people working for months on end without profitable results. But Mr Pulleyblank insists that the tougher the challenge, the more likely IBM will be ready to take it on. "Sometimes, we like to say that if there is not a significant chance of failure, then it may not be worth doing."

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Papers must embrace the internet, Murdoch tells editors By Aline van Duyn in New York

Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest newspaper proprietors, yesterday told American editors that they had all been "remarkably complacent" about the effects of growing internet use on the newsprint industry. "I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s," Mr Murdoch admitted. "I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn't... it won't... and it's a fastdeveloping reality we should grasp." Mr Murdoch is chairman of News Corporation, the global media company, and is mapping out an internet strategy for the group. His willingness to discuss ways for News Corp to embrace the internet follows years of shunning the subject after News Corp lost considerable sums when the internet bubble burst. However, the recent growth in advertising spending on the internet and declining newspaper circulation has pushed the issue to the forefront again.

"The threat of losing print advertising dollars to online media is very real," Mr Murdoch told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. He said his newspapers, which include the New York Post in the US and The Times and The Sun in the UK, had to find a way of bringing news to young people, who access news in an entirely different way. "They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important," Mr Murdoch said. Not making these changes would mean the newspaper industry would "be relegated to the status of also-rans".

He said that, although most newspapers had websites, most of these were "a bland repurposing" of print content. Instead, they had to become destinations, much as internet portals and search groups such as Yahoo and Google were today. As well as finding ways to incorporate blogs into news coverage, Mr Murdoch said it was important to link text with video. "We've spent billions of dollars developing unique sports, news and general entertainment programming," Mr Murdoch said. "Our job now is to bring this content profitably into the broadband world. and to garner our fair share - hopefully more than our fair share - of the advertising dollars that will come from successfully converging these media."

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Библиографический список

1.Goodale M. Phasal Verbs. Workbook. - Harper Collins Publishers, 1993. – 140 p.

2.Mascull B. Market Leader New: Intermediate. Course Book. – Longman, 2007. – 176 p.

3.Mascull B. Market Leader New: Intermediate. Teacher's Resource Book. – Longman, 2007. – 213 p.

4.Mascull B. Market Leader New: Upper-Intermediate. Course Book. – Longman, 2007. – 176 p.

5.Mascull B. Market Leader New: Upper-Intermediate. Teacher's Book. – Longman, 2007. – 221 p.

6.Seitel F.P. The Practice of Public Relations. – Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River. – New Jersey, USA, 1998. – 556 p.

7.Авдеева Е.А., Кузнецова Л.Б. PRCOM: учебник английского языка. Student's book. – СПб.: Нива, 2006. – 200 p.

8.Захарова Е.В. Welcome to the World of Public Relations = Приглашаем в мир Паблик Рилейшнз: учебное пособие для студентов высших учебных заведений. – M., 2001. – 128 p.

9.Назайкин А.Н. Англо-русский словарь по рекламе. – М.: Вершина, 2005. – 272 с.

Интернет-ресурсы:

1.www.aboutpublicrelations.net

2.www.usa.siemens.com

3.www.palm.com

4.www.samsung.com

5.www.ketchum.com

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Учебное издание

Гершкович Мария Александровна, Мякотникова Светлана Юрьевна

PRactice Book

Учебное пособие

Корректор И.Н. Жеганина

___________________________________________________________________

Подписано в печать 15.06.2009.

Формат 60 х 90/8. Усл. печ. л. 16,0.

Тираж 100 экз. Заказ № 136/2009.

Издательство Пермского государственного технического университета.

Адрес: 614990, г. Пермь, Комсомольский пр-т, 29, к. 113,

Тел. (342) 219-80-33.

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