Under CEO (1982-1990), Xerox launched a legendary turnaround. He introduced Leadership Through Quality – a company-wide total quality management (TQM) program. He also pioneered benchmarking – systematically comparing your products and processes against the best in the world (which was now Canon). This led to a massive reduction in defects, product redesign, and a new emphasis on manufacturing efficiency. The turnaround was so successful that it became a Harvard Business School case study. In 1989, Xerox won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award , the first company to do so in the manufacturing category.
Xerox was blindsided. Its costs were high, its product line was outdated, and its quality had declined. By the early 1980s, Xerox’s market share in copiers had collapsed from nearly 100% to around 40%. The company faced a near-death experience. xerox wikipédia
Xerox is the quintessential tale of . It is a parable of how success can breed myopia. The company invented the PC, the GUI, Ethernet, and the laser printer – the building blocks of the 21st-century office – and gave them away for free because they didn’t fit its existing business model of selling copies per page. It is a permanent case study in business schools about the "innovator’s dilemma": The very management practices that make a company dominant in its market make it nearly incapable of responding to disruptive change. Under CEO (1982-1990), Xerox launched a legendary turnaround
Xerox executives from the East Coast, whose entire business model was selling large, centralized copiers, could not comprehend the value of small, networked, personal devices. When Steve Jobs of Apple visited PARC in 1979 in exchange for allowing Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple (a deal that would net Xerox over $100 million), he saw the future. He famously remarked, "Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing." Xerox let the GUI and mouse slip away. Apple released the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984). Microsoft later copied the concept for Windows. Xerox’s own attempt to commercialize the Alto, the Xerox Star (8010) in 1981, was technologically brilliant but priced at $16,000+ per workstation, a commercial failure. This led to a massive reduction in defects,