When Mr. Emerson said this back in the 1800's, he truly meant "man"... as in male. However, in today's world you could add "or woman" to the end of that quote with the proof in women like Indra Nooyi, Ursella Burns, Meg Whitman, Irene Rosenfeld, Andrea Jung and many more important women in today's business world. With that said, this week's case study is in fact about "one man" and he is Charles Schwab. He took a small discount securities brokerage company and turned it into one of the most successful securities brokerage and financial firms.
I truly admire cases like this because it's one of those good old underdog stories. You got a small company with limited capital and resources, and they somehow come out ahead of the national full-line brokers by shaking up the industry. This was only possible because Chuck was able to stick to his pricing strategy and leverage the emerging technologies at the time to change the way people traded stocks. In order for companies to be successful with a pricing strategy, it is crucially important for them to manage their costs. In this case, Schwab did an excellent job in flexing the size of his workforce in order to meet the demands of the market and keep the company's employment costs low.
He had one solid, enduring competitive strength: keep costs down to serve customers' interests....
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