Number of words: 81 The overwhelming importance of future profits is counterintuitive even in Silicon Valley. For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about … Read more

Number of words: 67 Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just three years before, Microsoft and Google were each … 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

Number of words: 47 A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. Excerpted from ‘Zero to One’ by Peter Thiel

Number of words: 221 The event and the campaign it was designed to support were the brainchildren of Austin Energy, a power-generating utility owned by the city of Austin, Texas. Austin Energy’s campaign has already won the endorsement of dozens of cities and towns, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver, as well as Austin … Read more

Number of words: 146 The essence of the Toyota story is that it is a company with a learning culture. It is a world-class heuristic device, a machine for promoting continuous self-education of the individuals and of the company culture. It first learned how to make mass production work more harmoniously than anywhere else in … Read more

Number of words: 140 Tetsuo Agata,in the later years of his long career, doubled as general manager of Toyota’s huge Honsha plant in the Toyota City complex and as the company’s overall manufacturing guru. Before that, he lived for years in America and has many American friends. One was a senior manager with Dow Chemical, … Read more

Number of words: 190 The Big Three, with labor as a fixed cost and no freedom to cut earnings in bad times (as Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers could), were caught in an infernal cycle. They could not close factories quickly enough to adjust capacity to falling demand. This made them even less competitive against … Read more

Number of words: 540 That was the period when I began to develop an aversion to young men called “Product Managers”. They usually came with a degree in English or economics, and the more recent ones had done engineering but had abandoned the technical career to do an MBA at one of the Indian Institutes of … Read more

Number of word: 120 As Dewan of Travancore he undertook a tough campaign against the State Congress leaders, who were arrested. The principal target of the government was the Christian community which used its economic resources to support the Congress Party. Christians had been almost totally excluded from government jobs by generations of Travancore Maharajas who … Read more