Execution without Excuses

I have always wondered if our company is the HP of the personal computer world. We do not do rocket science, but fortunately we do sit inside some huge walls of economies of scale and know-hows created by high capital and technological intensity required in our industries. Still, the following quotes from Michael Dell might hold true even for our industries:

Harvard Business Review, March 2005
Execution without Excuses

"I founded the company over 20 years ago with $1,000 in starting capital. By contrast, Compaq had been launched two years earlier in Texas with some $100 million in capital. That's an unbelievable difference. Dell bubbled up through a kind of Darwinian evolution, finding holes in the way the industry was working. We didn't become asset-light just because it was a brilliant strategy. We didn't have a choice.": Michael Dell

(In the "Lean Enterprise" training, we learned how the "sea of inventory" covers all the rocks of process imperfections and wastes. Big companies sit on huge levels of inventories so they will never have to bump these rocks. But because they don't see these rocks, big companies generally do not have as much incentives to continue moving forward towards perfection.)