Acer America

Memorandum

To: Stan Shih, CEO

Re: Identifying and addressing issues in Acer!

Issue #1: We need to examine our business model!

Mr. Shih, I strongly believe that our goal of becoming one of the world’s top five PC brands cannot be achieved under our existing business model! Please listen! I know you largely attribute Acer’s mid-1990 successes to our “client-server” organizational structure but I believe that this arrangement has been a double-edged sword to our company: on the one hand, it was out of this structure that the Aspire PC was born; on the other hand it led to communication and collaboration breakdowns between RBUs and SBUs.

I believe that we should maintain the entrepreneurial culture we’ve strived to develop at Acer but modify it in such a way that encourages greater collaboration among RBUs and SBUs. Given the new open-sourcing tools available to business communities today such as wikis, blogs and other various uploading devices this should be easy to implement. As Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, explains:

“It was long assumed that producing any product of substance or complexity takes some kind of hierarchical organization or institution. The assumption was that you needed top-down vertical integration to get such things done and out into the world. But thanks to our ability to upload … you can now produce really complex things … with so much less hierarchy and so much less money than ever before.” (p. 96)

I know an adjustment of this magnitude to one of our company’s strongest foundations, “every man is lord of his castle”, can be difficult but we must be prepared to change! Thomas Friedman further advises:

“…the companies that have managed to survive and grow today are those that are most prepared to change. They are the ones that recognize ' faster than their competitors ' everything new that the flattening of the world enables … and are the first to...