Free Management Dissertations - Nonetheless, When The Miraculous Conditions Of The High-tech Years Began To
Nonetheless, when the miraculous conditions of the high-tech years began to wane, and when sales were slipping and customers buying Marconi’s products more hesitantly, the wisdom of this transit to telecommunications began to look much more dubious. This decision finally proved disastrous. On July 5th 2001, Marconi suspended its shares for an entire day a highly unusual move for a major FTSE company. The next day, Lord Simpson announced that Marconi profits would be 50% lower than in 2000; extremely angry investors panicked and began to sell their shares immediately, causing a 54% drop in the share-price of the company.
Technological Incompetence. After a few weeks of the crisis, the Marconi board finally realised that it must consolidate financial affairs for all of its companies; though it realised at the same time that doing this would be an extremely complicated and difficult matter. Desperately, in April 2001, thirty days before releasing its annual results, Marconi announced a restructuring plan that would be orchestrated by John Mayo. The central task of this restructuring was to be the ‘ elimination of duplicate information systems through the implementation of a single company-wide systems platform’ (Brody & Dunston, 2004: p68). John Mayo announced a $250 million deal with Oracle to provide this system; Oracle was chosen because ‘ . . . of the vision and understanding of our integrated business requirements, combined with the ability to implement them very fast’ (Brody & Dunstan, 2004: p.69). Nonetheless, the incompatibility of Oracle technology with Marconi businesses and Oracle’s lack of experience in this field led to an unsatisfactory system implementation and to the stalling of Marconi’s revovery.
Publicity Mismanagement. Until the very eve of the crisis, Lord Simpson personally assured both Marconi share-holders and the stock-market that all was financially well with the company. Moreover, while other CEOs sensed the slowing of the market and took defensive measures accordingly, Lord Simpson continued an expensive acquisition of further communications companies. Further, the Marconi management insisted on restructuring and protecting their bonuses at a time when the company was losing billions. Section 3: Research Aims & Objectives
The research aims and objectives of this dissertation will be as follows.
(1) To set-down empirically testable hypotheses that will allow the corroboration
or refutation of the dissertation research question.
(2) To gather data interviews, questionnaires, literature etc.,about the
management failures that led to the collapse of Marconi.
(3) To analyze the extant academic literature to see how theoretical principles
and practical examples can be usefully applied to the Marconi case-study.
