New Slides

09.08.2005

09.08.2005

“Chinese Apparel Makers Increasingly

Seek the Creative Work” —headline/NYT/08.05

“The West Has Lost The Will To

Fund Basic Research” —headline/FT/08.05

“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

HP’s Big “Duh”!

Decentralize ($90B)

Undo “Matrix”Accountability

Source: “HP Says Goodbye To Drama”/BW/09.05/re Mark Hurd’s first 5 months

Jeff Bowman.U North Dakota engineering.lives

Cariibbean.Indian calculus tutor —“Offshore Learning

Online: Overseas Tutors Help Students in USA”/USA Today/08.05

“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)

“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

“Turning Supermarkets

Into Restaurants, Too” —headline/NYT/08.05/re Whole Foods

“Clear” Signals!

Robinson/$500K

Puckett/Public Hanging

“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)

“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

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living

someone else’s life. —Steve Jobs

09.02.2005

Scale?

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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)