receive inordinate attention in business books and media, and executives are always quick to bring them up: Starbucks’s revolution in the coffee house business. Southwest’s triumphs in discount airlines. Cirque du Soleil’s reinvention of the circus business. Even Masco’s coup in faucets. Yes, it does happen.
But none of these strategies appeared out of the blue from the unfettered minds of super-managers. They came from a deep comprehension of the industries involved and the conditions at work in them. The founders of Southwest discovered a way to exploit a hole in the fare and route structures of established competitors. Starbucks succeeded not simply by brewing better coffee and creating an attractive coffee house experience, but by gaining scale and building the unique corporate skills needed to replicate that experience not tens or hundreds but thousands of times.
The founders of Cirque du Soleil, performers themselves, understood the essence of the traditional circus—that it was focused on children and that its economics were badly strained by the expense of transporting and caring for large, wild animals. By focusing on an adult audience, which let them drop many of the animal acts, they skillfully positioned themselves to avoid one of the industry’s greatest drains on profits while targeting customers with the highest willingness to pay.10 That’s not a cavalier disregard for industry forces: It’s surgical precision.
Look, too, at Warren Buffett’s portfolio. Most people don’t know he’s made significant investments in furniture. Like Masco, he also saw potential in the industry. But Buffett chose to invest in furniture retailing, not manufacturing, and bought several successful furniture sellers around the United States. He seems to be experimenting to see if these downstream retailers can benefit from the intensely competitive conditions upstream in furniture manufacturing—the very conditions that brought down Masco, Mengel, and all the others. In the long run, these may not turn out to be Buffett’s most brilliant ventures, but they reveal a real strategist playing his cards carefully with a deep appreciation of the forces at work in the industry.
No one can say that the decision to enter or remain in a tough industry is right or wrong on the face of it. Remaking a difficult business, as Masco set out to do, isn’t easy, but as we’ve seen, it can and has been done. When it works, though, it’s always a two-sided affair: It involves an industry, or part of an industry, that can be changed and a firm with a viable way to do so.
THE MISSING INFORMATION
What does all this tell you about Masco and its failed furniture venture?
For the full answer, we must look more closely at Masco’s actions and at how most of my students—people much like you, I suspect—saw only the upside potential of the opportunity.
After a class has voted for Masco to enter furniture manufacturing (and they always do), I ask the strongest proponents of the move how the firm should proceed. What specific actions should Masco’s managers take that will cause it to perform above the average in its new line of business?
Alongside the bold decision to enter, the proponents’ plans usually look surprisingly lackluster. Nearly all of them start with “Masco should acquire …” and go on to add some grand but vague statements about rationalizing production, improving efficiency, leveraging the company’s professional management, using “power marketing,” and so on. When I want to know what the company would do differently, how “professional management” would work here, or what would set the firm apart from others, the answers get progressively vague and superficial. They haven’t thought about all that.
What becomes clear is that their arguments are propelled by an enthusiasm for the company itself, for what it’s achieved in the past, and for the storehouse of capabilities it could bring to a new venture. What is missing is a specific plan that shows why all of that will matter in this industry, and how it will neutralize the long-lived forces that have broken so many other firms.
These discussions always remind me of how French generals after World War I responded to the fact that, in the previous half century, Germany had twice defeated French armies. The generals took a number of steps, including construction of the now-infamous Maginot Line, but a key reason, they said, that France would not be defeated again was the élan vital of the French soldier. Élan vital means “vital spirit” and the gist of French thinking was that the superior determination or attitude of the French army would defeat whatever the Germans threw at it. Of course, we know how well that worked. It was the military equivalent of the myth of the super-manager.
Masco’s vital spirit wasn’t enough, either. Its leaders hoped its superior management and manufacturing skills would lead it to victory on a new front, and that the same strategy that had brought it great success in faucets would do the same in furniture. But, while similar in some ways, the two industries were different in other ways that Masco either failed to notice or appreciate.
Masco’s purchases of furniture companies at three price points—low, middle, and high—reflected its belief that significant scope economies, or savings that come from producing a wide range of products, were possible in furniture. That approach had worked in faucets, where a range of products could be made in the same factory, sold through the same channels, installed by the same plumber, and often bought by the same customer for use in different locations in a house. In furniture, however, manufacturing, distribution, retailing, and customers differ dramatically from the top end of the market to the bottom, making scope economies much more difficult to achieve. Discount furniture is mass-produced and mass-marketed, while expensive furniture is largely handmade and distributed through specialty retail shops. Few customers buy furniture at both ends of the price and quality spectrum, and the products are almost never found at the same retailer.
Similarly, scale economies were difficult to come by in furniture. Even after it purchased its way to market leadership, Masco held only a paltry 7 percent of the market, compared with its 30 percent in faucets. Seven percent was unlikely to confer much, if any, economic advantage, particularly when spread across so many styles, so many manufacturing plants, so many channels, and so many price points.
Like other furniture manufacturers, Masco’s fortunes were hindered by the industry’s extreme product variety, high shipping costs, and cyclicality, which in combination make it extraordinarily difficult to manage a supply chain efficiently, or profitably substitute capital equipment for labor. Without a compelling way to address these issues, a manufacturer will always be at their mercy.
Above all, Masco failed to learn the biggest lesson of its success in faucets. Its one-handle and washerless products gave it unique advantages that addressed important customer needs. Everything else it did in that industry flowed from those key differences. In a market where functionality was crucial, Masco had a demonstrable product edge. In furniture, an industry ruled more by fashion than function, Masco had no such core advantage, nothing that was strong enough to counter the gravitational pull of the industry’s unattractive competitive forces.
Like those French generals, Masco failed to access its own battle readiness. It placed unwarranted faith in its superior management élan vital and underestimated the forces it was up against. One executive used a different but similar metaphor to describe what the company did: “Masco walked into a lion’s den and was unprepared to meet a lion.”
THE STRATEGIST IN REMORSE
Richard Manoogian, CEO-strategist and son of the company’s founder, took the outcome hard. At stake wasn’t merely a company he ran but the legacy his father had created and passed on to him. Father and son had strung together thirty-one years of consistently superior performance and created a superb reputation on Wall Street. All of that went up in smoke. In a story titled, “The Masco Fiasco,” Financial World observed: “The Masco Corp. was once one of America’s most admired companies; not anymore.” Though Manoogian promised to return the company to “its past glory,”
