The last two, note, are engaged in the trendiest sector (life sciences) of the highly favoured pharmaceutical industry. Astra's management, moreover, had decried the mega-merger wave in its industry in most scornful terms - until the moment came when its organic growth prospects seemed insufficiently rosy to guarantee profitable independence and merger synergies (i.e., savings) seemed more attractive As Thinking Managers has often observed, you can improve the bottom line by cutting expenditure, increasing sales, or (preferably) both. Of the three alternatives, however, the first is much the easiest.
That's because the other two probably cannot be achieved without transforming the company and its management. That is a tremendous test of both will and skill. The struggles at giants like Royal Dutch-Shell, Siemens and Philips show how fruitless it is to attempt radical changes in behaviour unless you first tear down a conservative framework. Shell's new chairman, for instance, is now placing single chief executives in charge of the various businesses. That comes after several years of attempted management reform. The step - hardly revolutionary in most other companies - should have been taken in the first stages of reform. Even now, Shell hesitates to appoint a chief executive for the entire group world-wide, for no good reason.
You can see the bad reasons simply by visiting the Shell head office in The Hague, where directors and their flunkies occupy whole floors apiece. Thinking Managers reported earlier how some top executives in Silicon Valley, even a mega-rich mogul like Andrew Grove of Intel, were abandoning their private offices for desks on the executive floor. The dignity and privileges of the summit are among the first objects of revolutionaries in politics. They should be equally prominent targets in management transformation.
Reinforcement for this truth came in the recent turmoil over the top post at Marks & Spencer, the retail group thought by many to be Britain's best managed company. Commentators remarked, almost unanimously, that the chairman and chief executive, Sir Richard Greenbury, was too powerful, had a domineering style that subjugated other managers to his will, had stayed too long at the helm, and should not have held both roles. Those have now been separated, but only after an unseemly public battle in which Greenbury again won - getting the successor of his choice.
The case also illustrates how the concentration of power and privilege at the top goes hand-in-hand with conservatism in strategy. Recently, Greenbury told a public audience scornfully that he would believe in electronic commerce when he saw it. If he can't see it now, either the M&S chairman must be blind, or he sees only what he prefers to see. As Michael de Kare-Silver points out in the excellent book E-Shock (Macmillan), already some 15-20% of consumers say they would prefer to shop electronically, rather than visit shops.
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