Strategic Mangement Class

What i learnt today? in Strategic management class
- The first topic I remember from todays class is about the McDonalds case in 1992.
An old day (Stella Liebeck , New Mexico) burnt her skin (3rd degree burns) bcoz of spill of McD's coffee, which would be generally of around 170 deg. Jury awarded her 160K for compensatory damages and 2.7 mln punitive damages. ( I did some research on this case..hehehe..)

- Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs loosing his laptop in Sep, 2000 at a business talk.
(industrial espionage...). FBI investigated the theft, but clndt recovered it.

- What is "Kaizen"? - Its a jap term that means continuous improvement, taken from words 'Kai' means continuous and 'zen' means improvement.Kaizen strategy calls for never-ending efforts for improvement involving everyone in the organization – managers and workers alike.

- How can a public company go Private? - A public company can “go private” if it completes a transaction that results in its publicly traded securities being held by fewer than 300 persons.

- Books suggested by Dr.Abdul Rasheed...
" Coptation" - author not sure
" A Random Walk down WallStreet" - Burton G. Malkiel
"Hypercompetition" - Richard A. Daveni

- In hypercompetition , companies follow punctuated equilbrium process. A company cannibalises its own product and comes out with a new one, before its competitors would come up some thing new. This happens mostly in Hi-Tech companies like electronic and semiconductor products where the prodcut life is small and tech innovations are huge. For example Gillette came out with twin blade and three blade razors (Mach 3).
Recently in Sep 2005 they came out with 5 balde razor(Fusion) with and w/o power -" the future of shaving". This is a bit of too much innovation. BTW the biggest competitor for Gillette is Schick.