Hardball, Now More than Ever!

Southwest Airlines advertised slogan a few years back personifies their hardball attitude: "We came. We saw. We kicked tail." They didn't just say this, but truly lived it! George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer describe, in their article Hardball: Five killer strategies for trouncing the competition, how Southwest CEO, Herb Kelleher, dispatched letters company wide with the headline "Commencement of Hostilities", after United tried to copy their low fare services in California. He warned employees of the ensuing competition, and the potential causality of such competition on the companies performance, stock price, job security and growth opportunities, if United were to succeed. These letters capitalized and exploited people's will to win, so much that Southwest employees arrived to work wearing camouflage uniforms and battle helmets.

With the recent, less than stellar, Q2 earnings call by Novell and subsequent nose dive of Novell stock, now more than ever is it important to adopt hardball behaviors.

How do you write the frustration? The most important hardball behavior Novell executives must leverage and exploit is our will to win. I can't speak for everyone, or even the majority of Novell employee's, but nonetheless, exploit me and my will to win. I want to say; "I was here, I saw, and I kicked ass!" I couldn't give anyone an honest answer or objective judgment on whether I believe Jack Messman or any other executive is doing there job or not, and it's not my place to do so. But what I can say from observation and personal desire is that many people here at Novell want to see this company return to greatness. This is not an impossible task, and it's not a task just one person can tackle. But it is an attitude that needs to be displayed top to bottom. If our executives told us we needed to wear camouflage; I would do it and I think many others would too. Employee's need to witness this attitude of winning from each executive, and then see and feel it hammered home by directors and manager who will be relentless in this pursuit. Be the last person standing! Don't leave the building until your people leave!

By no means am I a bitter or disgruntled employee. I love Novell and I believe in our potential; thus, I want more!! Enough adolescent ranting and raving...

In conclusion, Hardball authors, write five strategies to be deployed in bursts of ruthless intensity:

1. Devastate rivals' profit sanctuaries
2. Plagiarize with pride.
3. Deceive the competition.
4. Unleash massive and overwhelming force.
5. Raise competitors' costs.

I like all of these strategies, and the authors explain in detail how they can be deployed successfully. In particular I like the last strategy to raise the competitors' costs. Is that something that Novell can do to its competitors? Tricky, but yes.

Suse Linux is the bleeding edge Linux ditro on the market for enterprise customers, in that, Suse is + or - six months ahead of Redhat in the kernel development and release cycle, so what does this mean in the Open Source world? We put extensive resources behind developing the Linux kernel, and working with partners to develop open source drivers to work with the next kernel release. We harden the kernel for six months, and then Redhat benefits from our hard work, and releases their version with much of the work we've done or collaborated on. This is not saying they are not putting resource behind the same development activities, but they are putting less of such resources; thus, lowering their operating expenses.

Put aside the reputation Suse Engineering has for developing and releasing new versions of the OS on time every six months, and imagine what would happen, if Novell/Suse decided they would the release six months or longer to benefit from Redhat development. Maybe this is to simplistic and naive, but it should coerce Redhat to assign additional resources to kernel and driver development, or Redhat could push back their release, and wait for Novell to pick up the slack. Either way it looks terrible for Redhat; on one hand it increases their costs, or shows how unfriendly or undedicated they are to open source development on the Linux kernel.

The other alternative to this hypothesis is to partner with Redhat on kernel and driver development, and share the burden of such costs more evenly, and turn and point at Microsoft in a more collaborative form. This could be collusion, but could more effectively devastate the profit sanctuary of Windows.

The greatest lesson learned from reading this article, from the Harvard Business review, is the understanding that Hardball is more than anything an attitude that an individual displays every day he comes to work, whether it be the ball park, the battle field or the corporate office; because of his or her overwhelming desire to win and make the competitors lose!

The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.