Compare and contrast the turnaround and rejuvenation strategies of BMW, Swatch and the Labour Party. Are there general lessons that can be extracted?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

All of these enterprises had experienced crises arising from lack of external support, although the
underlying reasons were qualitatively different. BMW’s large cars were no doubt desirable in post-
war Germany, but too few people could afford them. Cheap mechanical Swiss watches seemed very
unexciting when compared with the new electronic watches in the 1970s, indeed they could not even
keep time as accurately. Labour’s policies were simply out of tune with the majority of voters.
BMW’s response, based on the wishes of the dominant shareholders, was to make much cheaper cars
under licence. After the banks had become the owners of the devastated Swiss watch industry, they
appointed Messrs. Hayek and Thomke to effect a classic turnaround strategy, by exploiting nascent
electronic watch developments in Switzerland (the first product of which was the Bulova Accutron).
Neil Kinnock began the transformation of his unelectable party to the one that, led by Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown, later formed the UK government for 13 years. However, the transformation took 18
years in opposition and the abandonment of some core Labour principles such as ‘Clause 4’, which
in theory committed the party to take all the dominant British industries into state ownership. What
these three organisations have in common is that their recovery strategies successfully addressed the
key barriers to future survival and success. Each strategy, however, manifest quite long periods of
inertia, reluctance to acknowledge the need for change, leading ultimately to a sense of crisis
prompted or imposed by a combination of internal and external constituencies, namely owners,
prospective customers or voters, and external commentators and opinion formers).