GLAXO

Glaxos story was very different. Founder Joseph Edward Nathan, with his brother-in-law created the company as a general merchant in 1861

 Opened new subsidiary in 1905 to commercialize a patent he had purchased for manufacturing dried milk. Due to good marketing campaign waged by his son Alec, the company quickly became Britains leading supplier of dried infant milk. It was to be the first time firm exploited someone elses invention.

 Seventy-six years later, Glaxo introduced Zantac, the ulcer medication in 1981. the leaders were SmithKline, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly. Glaxo was a latecomer, launching Zantac five years after Smith Kline's best-selling ulcer medication, Tagamet. Zantac had no remarkable scientific or medical advantage over Tagamet. The only difference was that Zantac was packaged in such a way that fewer pills were required each day.

 According to conventional wisdom in the industry, zantac could never win more than 50% of the market. As the pioneer, SmithKline had already invested in educating doctors about the new type of ulcer medication Glaxos market research indicated that doctors viewed Zantac as another Tagamet Glaxos salespeople therefore could concentrate on promoting the benefi ts of Zantac versus Tagamet. Glaxo decided to put a price premium on Zantac to stress its superiority over Tagamet.

 Throughout this time,SmithKline continued to invest heavily in R&D, but Glaxo fared much better in terms of sales and profitability it was eventually able to purchase its more innovative competitor in 2000

SHELL
In the years before World War II, Shell was very much a one-man band. Henri Deterding had led the merger in 1907 of his Royal Dutch Petroleum Company with Shell Transport and Trading to form the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. the corporation prospered and became one of the main rivals to the great American oil companies that emerged from the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust.

 Deterdings strong personality and impressive record gave him a position of unchallenged power inside Shell. Unfortunately, it also put him in a position to consider financial and moral support for Adolf Hitler, whom Deterding saw as the man most likely to preserve Europe from the Communists. Deterding visited Germany frequently and eventually married a German. Luckily for Shell, he retired in 1936, before he could make any commitments that would have embarrassed the company later on.

 The company did not forget its narrow escape: Deterdings successors were never allowed to be so powerful. In 1964, the board rejected advice from McKinsey & Company to install an Americanstyle chief executive officer. Instead, the board installed a Committee of Managing Directors as the top executive authority in the company

Its chairman was only marginally more responsible than its other members. following a crisis triggered by the companys overstatement of its proven oil and gas reserves has Shell opted for a classic CEO leadership model. Still, even now, it has remained remarkably careful to avoid placing an authoritarian leader at the top.

Shells CEO, in describing this transformation of the governance structure.

 BP, in contrast, appears not to have drawn any lessons when in 1951 Iran nationalized its assets, which accounted for fully 75% of the companys oil supply. After receiving compensation two years later following a coup, BP failed to diversify its asset base significantly in the ensuring decades, ending up heavily dependent on a small number of sites in Alaska and the North Sea. As oil prices plummeted toward the end of the 1990s, those assets lost value, and BP found itself caught short again. Doggedly repeating its mistake, it embarked on a new elephant hunt and is now as heavily dependent on sites in Russia and other former Soviet states as it was on its Iranian assets.

Although BP has already suffered dramatically from its failure to observe the principle of diversification, it is clear the company has not taken the lesson to heart.

It is striking how easily then-CEO brushed off concerns about taxes and the role of the Russian state.

"The temperature always keeps changing from cold to medium, but the back taxes were sorted out for 2001, and I expect there will be further large claims in 2002 There are many other places in the world where large claims are made. Discussions usually take place, and a settlement is reached