Number of words: 331 He had a great idea and a special talent. He was somewhat charismatic, and for years his sales figures kept climbing every month. His own family and his own community thought he was terrific. But he wasn’t paying attention to his own costs and he didn’t pay enough attention to the … Read more
Number of words: 84 A really good CEO is a chameleon. Sometimes that means he has to be a bastard, even though the role doesn’t seem to fit. Sometimes he can be a nice guy, a strong leader who builds consensus amongst his employees. All of the time he has to know which role to … Read more
Number of words: 141 During the strategic planning process, I learned that at United, as at many companies, management has been intensely focused on controlling and containing labour cost. That is important, of course, but it overlooks the fact that for an airline, and probably many other companies, only a third of the total cost … Read more
Number of words: 331 Chrysler built its cars on speculation. The company would forecast what car buyers and dealers would want” which colours, which options, which models. Then Chrysler would make the cars, hoping that their sales would match up with dealer orders before the car moved out of the end of the production line.But … Read more
Number of words: 224 The former owner of Richier was producing so many products and selling them in so many places in such a small volume, that there was just no way to put this Humpty Dumpty company back together. We needed to simplify and identify the products that made money and expand on those. … Read more
Number of words: 90 Ford was still making wood propellers for the trimotor airplanes in the 1940’s, long after the trimotor plane was gone. They built the propellers and sent them to a warehouse, never to be used or seen again. There was no need for the propellers, but no one in that vast company … Read more
Number of words: 99 I don’t understand airplanes and how they fly. That probably sounds unusual coming from an executive who used to run an airline. But I’m amazed whenever I see one of United’s 747 taking off. How could that much weight possibly get so gracefully into the sky? I have always believed it … Read more
Number of words: 1,205 Leigh Van Valen was a crazy-looking evolutionary biologist who came up with a theory so crazy no academic journal would publish it. So he created his own journal, published it, and the idea eventually became accepted wisdom. Those kinds of ideas – counterintuitive, but ultimately true – are the ones worth … Read more
Number of words: 132 Unlike people on the East Coast, who all wear the same skinny jeans or pinstripe suits depending on their industry, young people in Mountain View and Palo Alto go to work wearing T-shirts. It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at … Read more
Number of words: 350 The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. “Perfect competition” is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every … Read more
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