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Emerson - ein langfristiger Kauf??
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SURVEY: MANAGEMENT
The spirit of St Louis
Mar 7th 2002
From The Economist print edition
Hidden away in Missouri is a company that truly believes in
planning
WHEN America's Secretary
of State for Defence,
Donald Rumsfeld, heard that
Britain's prime minister,
Tony Blair, viewed the fall
of Kandahar as the end of
the war against the Taliban
and al Qaeda, he retorted:
“I'm from Missouri on this
one.” Missouri's motto is
“Show me”. Its people want
to see results, and so did
Mr Rumsfeld.
The same philosophy is
shared by Emerson, a $15.5
billion electrical and
electronics company whose unassuming headquarters sit just
outside St Louis, Missouri's largest city. Emerson makes a wide
range of goods, from household waste-disposal units to
sophisticated compressors for air-conditioning systems. For 43
years in succession it reported an increase in its earnings, a record
unmatched by any company quoted on an American stock
exchange. But last October, Dave Farr, who had taken over as
chief executive only a year earlier, had to announce the first
year-on-year fall in the company's profits since the 1950s.
The decision could have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely, by
some adroit accounting for the restructuring costs incurred in
recent years as the company switched from electrics to
electronics. But Mr Farr decided to come clean, in a webcast that
could be seen simultaneously by the company's 124,000 employees
around the world. “It was a very challenging communication,” he
says modestly. The workforce was surprised that the news was
not worse.
Like Jeffrey Immelt at GE, Mr Farr has taken on one of the most
difficult tasks in business: to follow in the footsteps of a legend.
His predecessor, Charles “Chuck” Knight, presided over the
previous 27 years of successive earnings growth, and remains
chairman of the company. During his reign, Emerson became a role
model at business schools from Harvard to Stanford. Mr Knight's
prize-winning article in the Harvard Business Review in 1992
remains one of the most illuminating ever written about the
internal workings of a corporation.
In that article he wrote: “What makes us tick at Emerson is an
effective management process.” The essential elements of that
process are still drilled into every manager. They include a strong
commitment to planning; a well-functioning system of control and
follow-up; an insistence on being the lowest-cost producer in each
business area; a determination to “keep things simple”; and a
desire (in true Missouri style) for action and results. Mr Knight
believes that companies don't fail because their analysis is faulty.
“Management usually knows what to do,” he says, “but for some
reason it doesn't do it.”
At the heart of Emerson's
long-lasting success lies its
planning process. Other
companies come on
pilgrimages to see it in
action, but few manage to
emulate it. Mr Knight spent
up to 60% of his time in
planning meetings of one
sort or another, and Mr Farr
does much the same. This is
in sharp contrast to the
average American corporate
chief executive whose diary
is full of pre-arranged
meetings with outsiders
that have little to do with
their company's core
business.
The planning process begins with the company's key managers,
the heads of approximately 65 divisions. They present their plans
for the future in small meetings at which the chief executive
continually challenges their assumptions. “One of the most
powerful tools a senior manager has is a question”, says Boston
Consulting Group's Mr Young. At Emerson, that tool is used to
ensure that the divisions' plans are built on deeply conservative
assumptions about growth and pricing.
Next, the pressure on managers to improve margins is directed at
reducing costs. Material costs at Emerson have fallen in each of
the past seven years. Having established such practice when
things were going well has meant it was already second nature
when the downturn came.
Emerson's system of control and follow-up depends on having
accurate measurements of various aspects of its business. The
engineers who run the company take it for granted that: “You
can't control what you can't measure.” There is a small number of
key business ratios that Emerson follows closely year in, year
out—in particular, free cash-flow and its own measure of return on
capital.
Like 3M, it also keeps a careful eye on the share of its sales
coming from new products. In 1997, the company decided it was
in too many old-established businesses with few new ideas, so it
set out to reinvent itself. “We took some time off for
self-assessment,” says one senior executive, “to search for new
areas of growth”. Over the next three years, Emerson sold some
electric businesses and bought some electronics ones, and decided
that: “The future is Asia.” Its electronics business, which in 1999
accounted for 14% of sales, now makes up 22% and is set to
increase to one-third. And the ratio of total sales that come from
new products has risen from 30% in 1996 to 35% today. The
company is showing Missouri, and the world, what it takes to
bounce back.
Quelle: Economist.com Business Section
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