New Slides 09.08.2005

1. New Slides09.08.2005

2. 09.08.2005

3. “Chinese Apparel Makers Increasingly Seek the Creative Work”—headline/NYT/08.05

4. “The West Has Lost The Will To Fund Basic Research”—headline/FT/08.05

5. “drive growth at a company famous for its discipline and productivity, but rarely thought of as a hive of creativity”—Point (Advertising Age)/09.05“These days both Intel and Microsoft are scrambling to pay the piper for years of design entropy”—WSJ/08.05

6. HP’s Big “Duh”!Decentralize ($90B)Undo “Matrix”AccountabilitySource: “HP Says Goodbye To Drama”/BW/09.05/re Mark Hurd’s first 5 months

7. Jeff Bowman.U North Dakota engineering.lives Cariibbean.Indian calculus tutor—“Offshore Learning Online: Overseas Tutors Help Students in USA”/USA Today/08.05

8. “HR doesn’t tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses.”—Garold Markle, Shell Offshore HR Exec (FC/08.05)

9. “Excellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world’s clamor, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one’s own, and transcribes without fear.”—Naomi Wolf

10. “Turning Supermarkets Into Restaurants, Too”—headline/NYT/08.05/re Whole Foods

11. “Clear” Signals!Robinson/$500KPuckett/Public Hanging

12. “Real Women Have Curves, and Ads: Marketers Discover Rail-thin Models Aren’t Only Choice”—headline/USA Today/ 08.05 (c.f. “Women’s Fashion Fall 2005”/NYT/09.05)

13. “Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.”—Winston Churchill

14. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.—Steve Jobs

15. 09.02.2005

16. Scale?

17. “All Strategy Is Local: True competitive advantages are harder to find and maintain than people realize. The odds are best in tightly drawn markets, not big, sprawling ones”—Title/Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/HBR09.05 “Sustainable domination is more likely in markets of restricted size. It is paradoxical but true that economies of scale are subject to scale limitations themselves. … When a market gets too big, diseconomies of coordination can prevail over economies of scale.”—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/“All Strategy Is Local”/HBR09.05

18. “Some observers have argued that Wal*Mart owes its superior returns to its enormous size and, as a consequence, its purchasing power. [But] if the purchasing power that comes with size were responsible for the company’s success, then Wal*Mart’s profitability should have increased as the company grew. Yet its operating margins have not increased since hitting their high watermark in the mid-1980s. … As Wal*Mart has grown, its profit margins have suffered in comparison with those of more geographically concentrated competitors, such as Target. … Sam’s Club appears to be no more profitable than Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club. The fact that Sam’s Club is the least geographically concentrated of the three competitors appears to have offset any advantages derived from Wal*Mart’s efficiency. … Wal*Mart’s experience overseas tends to confirm the limited impact of the retailer’s operating advantage. Overseas returns are less than half its domestic margins.” — Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/“All Strategy Is Local”/HBR09.05

19. “In media, broadly defined, actual experience has been even more strikingly at odds with prevailing strategic wisdom, which has proclaimed that successful media companies would be those that integrate content and distribution, are global in reach and embrace and master new technologies. … None of the leading media companies [Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp] has equaled the performance of the S&P 500 over the last 15 years.” (NB: also way below traditional newspaper companies)—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/ “All Strategy Is Local”/HBR09.05

20. “For all their talk of the global convergence of consumer demand, separate local environments are still characterized, in both obvious and subtle ways, by different tastes, different government rules, different business practices and different cultural norms. … The more local a company’s strategies are, the better the execution tends to be. Localism promotes decentralization—and since the days of Alfred Sloan, decentralized management has consistently served as a superior structure for concentrating management attention.” —Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/“All Strategy Is Local”/HBR09.05

21. A “position” is not an “accomplishment.”—TP

22. Joe Kramer, welder: “When my mother’s toaster went on the fritz, I asked myself, ‘If I were that toaster and didn’t work, what would be wrong with me?’ ”—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, on “empathetic identification”* (Joe: “burdens” vs “opportunities” to master complex problems) (*BC vs JK)