Hand it to Hyundai. You can sell anything to some people some of the time (think Hummer), but sooner or later, if you value corporate survival, you have to market a truly competitive product. Staying competitive, especially in industries with long lead-time R&D or complicated and expensive manufacturing tooling, requires attention to those new product [...]
Category Archives: Business/Economics
Keep Your Head Down, Bernie
December 15, 2008 – 7:24 pm
For most of a decade I worked for San Francisco’s Montgomery Securities (which became Banc of America Securities after a purchase). I was a securities analyst and then an institutional salesman. We called ourselves investment bankers, but no one ever asked for a definition of that title. I joined in 1986, staggered through the 1987 [...]
Madoff Made Off With My Money
December 13, 2008 – 1:50 pm
Bernard "Ponzi" Madoff When a con man is caught, his victims are often too embarrassed to press charges. I’m not. But the Madoff case is so big, with so many losers, I may be far back in a very long line. Take a number. Bernard Madoff, former chairman of NASDAQ and renown money manager whose [...]
InTirely Nitrogen
December 11, 2008 – 4:59 pm
“Are you N2 your tires?” asks Ingersoll Rand, marketers of Nitrogeneration™, a new way to inflate your tires…and Ingersoll Rand’s bottom line. By filling your tires with pure nitrogen instead of air, Ingersoll Rand, one of the various nitrogen-into-tires purveyors, contends that you will: (1) enhance safety because pressure decreases more slowly, (2) lengthen tire [...]
Secretary Paulson Wants a Section 8
September 24, 2008 – 5:58 pm
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Wall Street’s financial mess is complicated. The bail-out is complicated. But one thing is clear: whatever is to be done must be done in the sunshine with full recourse for chicanery and self-dealing.
Schweppervesence…and Malaria
August 18, 2008 – 8:35 am
Commander Whitehead Mixers…and medicine. In 1968, Commander Edward Whitehead came to Harvard Business School to give a talk on the continuing importance—in the face of computers and other rapidly advancing technologies—of people in industry. (A similar, and rather drier talk he gave in 1955 is here.) Perhaps the first CEO to become his company’s advertising [...]
Kenya in Willits
July 22, 2008 – 1:08 pm
Mendocino County Fires In Mendocino County recently, on a day when the smoke from the hundreds of still-burning forest fires was relatively tolerable, I walked through a nearly deserted city park in Willits with my son and my brother and noticed two black men lunching at a distant picnic table. From previous conversations with my [...]
Gasoline Prices: Prius Economics
May 22, 2008 – 11:19 am
This week our Prius odometer hit 40,000 miles. We bought the car in May 2005, exactly three years ago. We average 43 mpg. That means we have purchased 930 gallons of gasoline during the three years, or 310 gallons each year. Looking at the price of gas in Northern California (blue line) over those three [...]
Craigslist.org — A Different Kind of Company
April 22, 2008 – 10:46 pm
Craigslist, the largest source of classified ads in any medium throughout the world, serves 450 cities in 50 countries. Craig Newmark Started in 1995 by software engineer Craig Newmark, 55, as a bulletin board for posting notices of social events relevant to San Francisco-based software and internet developers, Craigslist now adds 30 million new listings [...]
Will There Be Water in Lake Chad?
March 29, 2008 – 8:06 pm
Much of the talk about unsettled times ahead looks to oil as a cause: economies will undergo transition and regional conflicts will increase. Think also about water. Lake Chad is an exemplar. At one time the world’s sixth largest lake, included in four African countries (Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria), it has, in less than [...]
