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The Dell Deal Explained: What a Successful Turnaround Looks Like

Harvard Business Review

And last year, he decided that the answer was to take the company private, to escape the hectoring of the public market. When competitors tried to copy the direct model, their channel partners — fearing for their own businesses — objected, preventing other PC makers from fully going direct. Dell returned as CEO in 2007.

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Strategy Lessons From Jean Tirole

Harvard Business Review

The academic study of strategy took a big leap forward in the 1970s when Michael Porter of HBS looked at earlier economic research on industry structure and noticed that market power — which economists wanted to minimize — was the same thing as sustained profitability, which corporate executives wanted to maximize.