Daniel Raff fra The Warton School holder oplæg
Kom og hør Daniel Raff fra The Warton School i Pennsylvania, og hans oplæg “What Became of Borders?” Det er Strategic Organization Design, fra Instituttet der står bag.
Borders was a US national (and later, international) chain of bookstores. It eventually became a large-scale vendor of recorded music as well. It was founded in 1971, became a chain in 1984, and was in the Fortune 500 by the late 1990s. Its 2011 bankruptcy was front-page news in the US and in the overseas geographies in which it operated. The company had at its heart an early expert system for merchandising and inventory control and stands as a sort of poster child for the application of information technology to retailing, a large and economically important sector of industrial economies and one generally understudied in strategy. The talk is drawn from a book project. Its emerging text is written from an evolutionary economics perspective but is hardly a tract. The firm in tight focus will probably be familiar to anyone who visited the states in the 90s or the first decade of this century; and its fate may seem to members of a community that mainly buys its books from Amazon now and mainly gets its music from Apple to have been inevitable. Daniel will argue that that isn’t the case and that there is a good deal to be learned—for those who have some interest in this type of business but also for those who do empirical strategy research—from studying the firm’s and industry’s dynamics more historically.