Focused companies

Despite numerous safety measures, accidents with hazardous substances still occur even though Safety Indicators (Sis) have been developed as pre-warning signs to focus companies resources on risk areas. Moreover, Sis required by authorities enabled them to assess the safety performance of companies and focus their resources on companies which have problems controlling their risks, Modarres (Modarres et al., 1994). 

Focus Conventional wisdom also holds that tightly focused companies - those deriving more than 80 percent of their revenues... 

As a result, many chemical companies embarked on major corporate transformations, shifting away from commodities and into specialties. ICI is a classic example. During the 1990s, it sold most of its commodity businesses and made large purchases of specialty-focused companies, including National Starch Chemical and Quest. 

The New Came - Dhaggregation and Focus 41 Focused companies like these perform better because ... 

The focused companies usually adopted one of two growth strategies. 

Group 2 Focused Companies Applying Technology for Different Markets... 

Group 3 Focused Companies Commercializing Related Products in a Single Major Market... 

From the start. Van Ameringen had created a highly focused company, a leader in U.S. markets. Moreover, after 1958 the firm became a highly successful competitor in international markets. But, unlike the other enterprises described in this chapter, its barriers to entry lay not in scale but in the quality of its products, protected by secrecy, by a stream of improved products, and by patents. 

The paths of learning of the two remaining focused companies evolved in a very different manner than those of the other eight. Cabot was a 125-year-... 

Witco s search for a substantial niche was an unprofitable one. Its income as percentage of sales ranked lower than any of the other focused companies described in this chapter. In the early 1990s its income averaged 60 million on revenues of 1.4 billion. Because Witco grew through acquisitions, its patent record was as weak as its financial one. In 1999 it was absorbed by... 

As the twenty-first century opened, only two of the nation s six multi-sectored companies that had created the U.S. chemical industry still existed—Du Pont and Dow. On the other hand, all but two of the smaller focused companies—Hercules and Witco—were now the leaders in a healthy American specialty chemical industry. 

The evolution of the two idiosyncratic companies, Witco and Cabot, well illustrates the themes of this book. Witco proved unable to overcome the barriers to entry created by the focused companies and failed to find a secure niche. Cabot, on the other hand, prospered through the decades as a producer of carbon black before turning in the 1950s to the strategy of closely related diversification. Then, as its historian notes, it entered into two completely new arenas. In 1987, however, a new CEO sold the new businesses and returned the company to profitability by concentrating on the base business and closely related businesses. 

From their beginnings, the other smaller focused companies played critical roles in the evolution of the U.S. chemical industry. Established in the 1920s, they provided the major American chemical companies with a variety of specialty chemicals needed to support the U.S. industry. At the same time, these specialty chemicals found a multitude of uses in many other industries. As a result, the focused companies became and remained central players in the competitive arena in which the strategic boundaries of the chemical companies were defined. 

Unlike the Swiss Rhine Valley companies, Solvay and Henkel maintained their focus in chemistry successfully over more than a century of their existence. Solvay increasingly became, after the 1970s, a specialty chemical company along the lines of the American focused companies while Henkel remained one of the three worldwide competitors in both consumer and industrial cleaning products. 

The success of the chemical businesses of the three major U.S. manufacturing enterprises—General Electric, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and Eastman Kodak—is part of the transformation of the industry into specialty chemicals after it had reached the limits of growth in the 1970s. Thus the stories are similar to those of the focused companies described in Chapter 4. Each of the three commercialized a small number of related products. Like the focused companies, they continued to prosper in the 1980s as the U.S. multiproduct companies restructured their product lines. 

Traditional chemical conglomerates and diversified groups restructure into four types of focused companies ... 

As the colleagues from McKinsey described in Nature Biotechnology, every company will need to work through these issues in its own way, but there are a few key questions that all biologic-focused companies need to examine. What is the impact of current regulatory/cost-contain-ment trends on biopharmaceuticals As... 

As a first cut, the chemical industry can be thought of as consisting of two main types of firms. There are "all around" companies, which are involved in different value chains, operate in several of those with large scales, and often occupy a number of stages of these value chains. In addition, there are many other companies which are more tightly "focused", and smaller. The focused companies are typically found downstream, where product-specific features, such as brand name and variety, are more important. 

Globalisation has caused companies to concentrate on core business and critical mass. It has resulted in a restmcture of the chemical industry into two types of focused companies [190] the molecule suppliers (commodities and fine chemicals) and the problem solvers (functional chemicals like additives and pharmaceuticals). Each type has its own characteristics as reflected by the role of the catalyst [418]. 

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), presented by the U.S. government, is another example of a quality yardstick. It has a comprehensive checklist that defines "quality" in terms of both internal operations and customer expectations. So it s both externally and internally focused. Companies use the checklist to guide internal evaluations. Some go through the review for an outsider s perspective on their operations. Excellence here doesn t necessarily assure economic success, however at least one winner went bankrupt. 

Because risk needs to be an ongoing focus, companies are increasingly devoting dedicated teams to risk management in the supply chain. These teams can do several things ... 

Market-focused companies are (or should be) customer-focused companies, particularly if the market is made up of a small number of customers, such as the major automotive companies. The principal disadvantage... 

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