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Donna Dubinsky

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I. Why was Donna so successful during her first 4 years at Apple before the JIT dispute? Dubinsky’s advanced because: (1) her division delivers results, (2) her individual performance is strong, (3) Apple’s environment permits rapid advancement, and (4) her boss helps her. 1. Sales delivered strong results, and Dubinsky was a recognized positive contributor to it. Dubinsky’s group performed well on key metrics including dealer satisfaction,supporting new product launches without delay, and scaling up operations as the Company grew. Her group had no complaints from other Apple divisions about costs, or from dealer customers about inventory availability,demonstrating strong logistics performance. She was playing for a winning team. 2. …show more content…

But, it is also possible that Dubinsky relied too much on Weaver and was afraid of change, became complacent, and missed a chance to work in a “sexy” group, advance, and build relationships with other powerful allies. 2. Surprisingly for a Harvard MBA, Dubinsky was cavalier about gathering data to prove she was performing strongly. She believed lack of dealer complaints wasipso facto proof of strong execution.She could not prove that her Distribution system presented fewer dealer complaints than Commodore’s, or had a faster delivery schedule than IBM’s, or was cheaper and more efficient than Tandy’s. When Jobs later challenged her results, she lacked routine benchmarking to rebut his criticisms. Dubinsky left herself vulnerable to a hypothesis that her measure of success – lack of dealer complaints – was not actually a success, but instead evidence that Apple was bearing too much of the inventory carrying expense in the supplier-dealer relationship. If Dubinsky had gathered comparative data in the ordinary course to measure her performance, she could have forcefully defended herself against Jobs’ JIT attack. 3. Dubinsky demonstrated some lack of initiative. She thought the problem in Apple’s supply chain was inaccurate demand forecasting by the manufacturing groups, but she seems to have made no effort to address that problem. Thus, her warehouses had three years of gluts and troughs, which directly led to Jobs’ JIT argument. This

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