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Consultants are an excellent tool an organization can utilize when looking to strategy-make. One thing that makes consultants so excellent at providing services for strategy-making is that consultation is essentially all they do (Greiner & Cummings, 2009). Most internal leaders such as the C.E.O only spend an average of 10 to 15 percent of their workload on strategy; as a result, they are prone to making mistakes and repeating past errors (Greiner & Cummings, 2009).
Consultants also bring in an unbiased, outside view and can help take an organization that is dead-set on their ways to the point of arrogance (Greiner & Cummings, 2009), like Microsoft, who failed miserably at embracing mobile technologies and missed out as a result, and inform said company that other rival companies like Apple and Google can come and usurp them – which in many ways, has happened to Microsoft over the past 10 years.
Below is a clip from an interview with former Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, laughing at the iPhone when it was first released. He should have been terrified if you ask me. I know it’s easy to talk in hindsight, but back in 2008 when I saw what iPhones and then Android phones could do, I was mystified. I knew this was a game changer and Microsoft had no answer to these emerging technologies back then.
In the video, Ballmer talks about strategy and his confidence in the Microsoft strategy, but failed to look forward because Microsoft was selling “millions and millions of phones per year,” in contrast to Apple’s zero phones sold per year at that moment (Ballmer, 2007). Years later, Microsoft was laughed out of the market as the last major update for Microsoft’s mobile phone operating system was in October of 2017, with the entire platform set to cease operations in December 2019 (Warren, 2019).
The reason the Microsoft strategy failed was because at first, Microsoft had no strategy beyond the status quo, which is evident based on the video above with Steve Ballmer’s response about Microsoft’s strategy at the time. The company felt no threat, so Microsoft did not innovate the Microsoft mobile platform until it was too late. Before iOS and Android, Microsoft’s mobile operating system was basically Windows XP on the phone. It was very limited and not something many consumers had a use for compared to the world-wide adoption rates of mobile phones today.
Apple and Google both looked forward, Microsoft became complacent and missed out on a billion-dollar industry and in many ways, have found themselves side-stepped by less of a need for the Windows operating system because of the massive success of iOS and Android. Perhaps with better consultation, we’d all be using Microsoft phones today, not Apple or Google phones.
References:
Balmer, S. [smugmacgeek]. (2007, September). Ballmer Laughs at iPhone [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
Greiner, L., & Cummings, T. (2009). Dynamic Strategy Making: Real Time Approach for the 21st Century Leader. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Warren, T. (2019). Microsoft to end Windows 10 Mobile updates and support in December. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/18/18188054/microsoft-windows-phone-windows-10-mobile-end-of-support-updates