W h y s o m e c o m p a n I e s m a k e t h e
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| R ES U LTS R EA CTION , WITHOUT U N DERSTANDING No B UILDUP ; No A C C UMU L ATED M O MENT UM N EW D I RECTION , ROGRAM, L EA D E R , E VENT , F AD , Each new Warner-Lambert CEO brought his own new program and halted the momentum of his predecessor. Ward tried to create a breakthrough with an expensive acquisition in the hospital supply business in 1982. Three years later, his successor, Joe Williams, extracted Warner-Lambert from the hospital supply business and took a $550 million He tried to focus the company on beating Merck, but his successor threw the company back to diversification and consumer goods. And so it went, back and forth, lurch and thrash, with each CEO trying to make a mark with his own program. From 1979 through 1998, Warner-Lambert underwent three major restructurings - one per CEO- hacking away 20,000 people in search of quick breakthrough results. Time and again, the company would attain a burst of results, then slacken, never attaining the sustained momentum of a buildup-breakthrough flywheel. Stock returns flattened relative to the market and Warner-Lambert disappeared as an independent company, swallowed up by Collins The Warner-Lambert case is extreme, but we found some version of the doom loop in every comparison company. (See Appendix A fora summary) While the specific permutations of the doom loop varied from company to company, there were some highly prevalent patterns, two of which deserve particular note the misguided use of acquisitions and the selection of leaders who undid the work of previous generations. Download 3.69 Mb. Share with your friends:
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